I have a Mac mini running Mavericks server. I installed the Atmail server + webmail vm [a linux centos distribution] in VMware Fusion Professional 6 with the VMware Tools addon. It works flawlessly. I've set it to start on boot and that works very reliably. However I've been looking for a way to also safely and gracefully shut it down whenever OS X shuts down for whatever reason. The Mac is connected to a UPS and configured to perform an automatic shutdown in case the battery starts running low so that's no additional problem.

Now the first thing I did was to go into Fusion's prefs and select "Power off the vm" when closing it. However I noticed that for some arcane reason closing the vm window would actually forcibly power off the vm: so then I found this post that showed me how to change the default power options and I managed to have the vm cleanly shutdown when closing its window or quitting Fusion altogether. At this point I was hoping to have solved the problem but as it turns out upon invoking system shutdown OS X doesn't wait for the vm to shutdown and terminates Fusion before it has a chance to do so. At this point I started looking for a way to automate the process of shutting down the guest os via some advanced setting but had no luck in doing so. That's when I found a command to shut the vm down: vmrun and it worked. The only thing left was to find out a way to execute this script on os x shutdown and giving it a little time to power off completely. However this turned out to be a nightmare: I spent hours looking through several ways to do this with Startup Items, rc.shutdown, cron, launchd, etc... but none of them worked the way I had configured them.

I have to say that I found very limited information on using launchd for a shutdown script execution and I know it's the latest thing in the OS X world so I'm hoping someone out there among you will be able to help me out with this. I still think this is an extremely basic feature to ask for and I was really surprised to find this little documentation on so many different aspects of this problem. Is Fusion too basic of an application for this?

I really hope someone can help. Thank you very much in advance.