So, I had this problem with a new virtual machine I installed in VMware Fusion where the aspect ratio was locked to 4:3 no matter how much I tried to resize the window. I didn’t understand what was going on since this was the third or fourth VM I had installed. There were a couple other things I had noticed, as well, like I wasn’t able to copy and paste to and from the VM.
I tried Googling and got nothing that helped me at all. I gave up. Yesterday, I was trying share between the VM and my MacBook and it told me that it couldn’t do it because the setup was still running…on a VM that was a few months old. I Googled that error and got an answer right away, had to unmount the floppy and cd drives while the VM was shut down, simple.
Once the VM was back up, I was able to install VMware Tools to do the sharing. Guess what else it fixed? The resizing issue.
So, there it is, if your aspect ration in VMware Fusion is locked and you cannot resize your VM window properly, or if you cannot copy and paste to and from your VM, then you need to install (or reinstall) VMware Tools.