Policies stall when a Mac VM is enrolled

[howie_isaacks]

For years I have been enrolling Mac VMs into Jamf Pro to test policies. Lately, I have noticed that some policies that run with an enrollment trigger stall. The Jamf log on the VM will show that a package is installing but it never shows a successful install. When I enroll a real Mac, this does not happen. I don't have a bunch of spare Macs to enroll, so using VMs is my only way to test out my enrollment policies. I have been seeing this issue with policies that run before DEPNotify launches and with policies that are in the policy array. Has anyone else seen this behavior? It is happening with more than one Jamf Pro server. I have spent hours today trying to figure out what's happening. Today I have a spare Mac that belongs to one of my clients here beside me, and it's running everything perfectly. At least I know my script and all of the policies are working. I just need for the VMs to work more reliably with enrollment policies. I won't always have a spare Mac around. I would love some ideas on how to make this work right. I use VMware Fusion, and the VMs I'm working with are running macOS Big Sur.

[SlidewaysF30]

Currently encountering this with the some newly built VM's in Fusion Player 12. Running the provisioning process via DEPNotify using a DEP mac Serial number in my VM's vmx file. It enrolls fine but once DEPNotify kicks off the first few policies, it eventually stalls on one and never finishes. This VM is on Big Sur. 

[howie_isaacks]

For me it seems to be intermittent. When this happens, I revert the VM to the last saved snapshot and start over. I have not yet tried this with a VM built with Monterey but that's something I will work on today. All I need is to verify that all of the policies in my policy array run. To date, I have never had this happen with a hardware based Mac. The only problems I have had are either I fat fingered something in the policy array or the policy itself was not setup correctly.

[SlidewaysF30]

Does it eventually make it through the second time? I've run it twice so far and it got stuck on two different policies. 

[howie_isaacks]

Most of the time, yes but it seems to do this only when I really need it to work 😡

[howie_isaacks]

I have no way of testing this except to download a trial of Parallels Desktop, but this never happened before I made the switch to VMware Fusion right after Big Sur launched. I had used Parallels since I got my first Intel Mac in 2006. They weren't ready for Big Sur despite saying they were, so I needed to move to VMware so I could continue to use VMs for testing and building packages. I've been thinking of going back to Parallels if they got their act together. My Windows VMs worked great but the Mac VMs were so slow and unresponsive they were useless. Part of that is Apple's fault but I blamed Parallels for not fixing the issue for me in a timely fashion. I liked the UI of Parallels better and I have found support from VMware to be lousy. For what we paid for two VMware licenses, we deserve better support.

[SlidewaysF30]

Did you ever get around to testing with Parallels to see if the issue persists? I still cannot get my VM's to fully complete DEPNotify using VMWare Fusion Player. Dunno if it's worth getting the Pro license if it is still not working as expected. 

[howie_isaacks]

The last several weeks I haven't had the chance. That's something I will be working on soon. I do want to move back to Parallels. I just liked the user experience better.

[SlidewaysF30]

Gotcha. Yeah, I'm debating on if I should just switch over to Parallels. Need to do some research to see what functionality it provides vs. VMWare Fusion