Sorry to resurrect this old thread. But, I thought my experience with a recent update to Fusion 8.1.1 would be relevant to others.
I set tools.upgrade.policy = "manual" on one of my virtual machines. Upon starting the VM, I received an error message stating that ""manual"" is an invalid value for "tools.upgrade.policy" and that it is being changed to "useGlobal".
However, setting tools.upgrade.policy = manual (notice no quotes) DOES work as expected.
Does anyone know if there's any documentation describing all the possible settings/values in a .vmx file? I've looked in the latest VMware Fusion V8 User Guide [1] and I don't see anything there.
[1] - http://pubs.vmware.com/fusion-8/topic/com.vmware.ICbase/PDF/fusion-8-user-guide.pdf