Running Java 7 in a VMware Fusion 10.8.x VM

As mentioned previously, I’ve moved the majority of my testing to OS X VMs running in either VMware Fusion or VMware ESXi. However, there has been one component of my build testing that I still needed actual Macs for: testing Oracle’s Java 7 updates. The reason for this is that Java 7 crashes when run inside of a VMWare Fusion VM.

Oracle has certified the following virtualization solutions as being Oracle JDK 7 and JRE 7 Certified System Configurations:

Certified:

Oracle VM 2.2

VirtualBox 3.x – 4.x

Solaris Containers

Solaris LDOMs

Not certified:

VMware virtualization solutions

Microsoft virtualization solutions

Unfortunately, that meant unless Oracle or VMware stepped up, Java 7 wasn’t going to run inside an OS X VM. Fortunately, VMware stepped up. There is now a script available from VMware to patch liblwawt.dylib in the Java 7 Runtime Environment. The patch addresses the Java 7 crashing issue, allowing Java 7 Update 17 to run normally in an OS X 10.8.3 VM.

The patch is specific to 10.8.x VMs and does not work in 10.7.x VMs at this time.

I’ve posted a copy of the Python script that applies the patch here on my GitHub repo:

https://github.com/rtrouton/rtrouton_scripts/tree/master/rtrouton_scripts/vmware_fusion_java_7_patch

I’ve also built a payload-free package to run the script:

https://github.com/rtrouton/rtrouton_scripts/tree/master/rtrouton_scripts/vmware_fusion_java_7_patch/payload-free_package