VMware Workstation 7.1.3 and Windows 7 SP1

[EtreLibre]

Windows 7 SP1 is now out, and I installed it.

But, now, when VMware need to swap a little, I have an error message that tell there is a problem to alocate that memory.

Maybe do you know how fix it ?

Thank you

[EtreLibre]

There are news...

If I install a new Windows 7 SP1 into a VM (I have also Windows 7 SP1 into my host) : often, VM is very slow to install and CPU get 100% usage.

So, it's unusable.. If someone from VMware want my logs, no problem.

I also asked VMware technical support what to do, and I wait response.

[EdP2]

You may want to check your ram usage. In a pretty much do nothing case my Win7 host draws just under 2GB, I'd guess that two Win7's are stretching your 4GB to the limit. Differences with pre-SP1 could be down to SP1 drawing more overhead.

Message was edited by: EdP I use the following gadget http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=165929 to get a quick and dirty check of the situation. Of course you could use the Task Manager instead.

[EtreLibre]

My laptop have 4 GB of RAM and my desktop 8 GB...

It's not possible RAM is full if I run only 1 or 2 VMs, and I already checked that.

Sincerely, I don't understand... I tried a 7 SP1 install and after the first reboot, vmware-vmx.exe use 100% CPU (25%, 1 full core) and VM is unusable.

If I click on "Pause" (that stops the VM) and "Resume", VM is OK...

[StevensDE]

There is no problem with your memory. 4GB or 8 GB is enough.

I have 16 GB memory. When I start a VM with more than 2 GB... all is very very slow.

Although I have over 12 GB free memory. (windows task manager)

This is a problem only with Win7 SP1. Without SP1 everything works great.

[EtreLibre]

If it can help, there is a log from a VM that is very slow (CPU 100%) :

Now it's slow even if I begin a Windows install...

The log :

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OY8DRLQV

[EdP2]

OK, I have now upgraded a second Win7 to SP1. This only has 4GB of memory and immediately hit the reported problem with an XP guest. I think I have managed to solve the problem for this particular guest by going to Workstation preferences and reducing the total amount of memory reserved for VM guests by 0.5GB (I don't know if this is the optimum).

[EtreLibre]

Thank you for your tests, I think this will help

[Mr0Al]

The setting I changed yesterday ("Allow some virtual machine memory to be swapped") no longer works today. I've tried reducing my guest's memory size, as well as reducing the "How much host RAM should the system be able to reserve..." setting, and tried the option "Allow most virtual machine memory to be swapped".

Nothing has worked so I'm uninstalling SP1 for now.

[EdP2]

I have now done a reasonable amount of net searching, and assuming that SP1's Dynamic Memory addition is the culprit, you can find the following:

a) HyperV and VMWare's Dynamic Memory management work in opposite directions. HyperV deliberately under-resources memory to a bare minimum then adds more as required, VMWAre adds too much then recovers the spare, Obviously a recipe for disaster if the SP1 memory manager kicks off first.

b) Two possible additional fixes are on the net:

1) Increase the guests priority. I've tried the following on the one screwed-up machine which still does not work perfectly: Start the vm using a short-cut to the guest as follows:

cmd/C start /High "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmplayer.exe" "Windows XP Professional.vmx"

Put this in a 'bat' file located with the guest files and launch the 'bat' from a short cut. This seems to help a bit.

2) Add a registry fix. USE AT YOUR PERIL, I'm still testing it for Win7 without HyperV. The 'fix' is as follows:

You create the host reserve inside the registry. Set the decimal  REG_DWORD value for HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows  NT\CurrentVersion\Virtualization\MemoryReserve to the number of  megabytes that should be reserved for the host. The default decimal  value is 32, for 32MB, while the maximum value is 1024, 1GB.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/virtualization2/Q-How-can-I-set-Root-Memory-Reserve-for-My-Hyper...

If you try this you will have to make a new Key, Virtualization, and a new DWord. Do NOT use if you don't know how to modify the registry. (Obviously I'm using 1024!)

Message was edited by: EdP    It would be nice to know that someone from VMWare was treating this as a VERY high priority problem.

Message was edited by: EdP  [EDIT]  Early results from applying the two fixes shown above appear promising. At least it doesn't break anything, and responsiveness of the XP guest is improved, with no seizures so far. I think it is safe to invite any other experienced registry hacker to try it and see if it helps their situation.

Message was edited by: EdP  [EDIT]  Appears to improve the operation of the limited memory machine, but I'm afraid these moves cannot be counted as successful fixes. Removal of SP1 is the only complete fix at present.

Message was edited by: EdP [EDIT] This is my final edit on this. It appears the registry fix goes the 'wrong way' and reserves memory for the host rather than fixing memory for the guest. I can find nothing that stabilises VMs on the one machine and I have now removed SP1 as being incompatible. I am however getting quite annoyed at the way VMWare apparently ignore this issue. Does no-one from their customer service group ever monitor the forum?

[DigiBC]

Actually I had planned to update my Windows 7 x64 to SP1 today, but after reading this thread I'm a bit confused...  :smileyconfused:

The new feature Dynamic Memory is said to be related to Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 only. So there must be a different reason for these performance issues under Windows 7 SP1...

A statement by VMware would be highly appreciated!!!

[EdP2]

I agree with your request that VMWare start taking notice of this issue!

From this link:

http://clubhouse.microsoft.com/Public/Post/8b1f2a5d-66ef-404b-98ae-9c943f404b1f

You will see the following statement:

. . . it also includes client-side support for RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory.   RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory are  two new virtualization features enabled  in Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1.

To me the only possible "client" that this could possibly refer to is a Windows 7 pc, while the Windows Server is the host. It would be a very unusual (though possible) set-up if Windows Servers were also clients of Windows Servers.

I think we can safely say that Dynamic Memory is there and probably switched on, but none of the control facilities are enabled as these are only found in the server edition.

Message was edited by: EdP [EDIT] Assuming you do not have a mission critical installation you can install SP1, see if it works ok for you. If it does not work then the uninstall procedure appears to work cleanly, at least in so far as vmware guests can then run without issue. I think most posters on this issue have installed every Windows update prior to SP1, so this narrows the causes down to those areas not previously addressed by updates -- dynamic memory is one such addition, and seems to fit the symptom of causing guest 'out of memory' issues.

[EtreLibre]

With mail support, VMware ask me to collect data and send them via FTP : I done it.

Please, if you have SP1 installed and have many problems, can you use support too, to help them to fix it ?

Thank you

[alexto]

Same problem here. I'm on a Lenovo T400, 8GB DDR3, SSD

Been using VMware Workstation before Windows 7 released till now. It's been fine until I recently applied W7 SP1.

I have 4 VMs running different version of Windows and Linux for my work and research:

1. Windows 2003 SP2, 3GB Ram

2. Windows 2008 R2, 4GB Ram

3. Centos 5.5 4GB Ram

4. Debian 6 2GB Ram

I run only one VM at any one time and problems happen to ALL of my VMs, however intermittent. Sometimes, my VMs will be very slow and unusable REGARDLESS of the guest OS that I run. Restart the VM may make it work normally (or maybe not, I need to try to restart more than once sometimes).

At normal state, my VMs run smooth as I have plenty of RAM and a SSD.

It is quite strange that when my VM happens to run very slow, the CPU usage is not high, host OS still run smoothly and my hard disk light hardly blink. I tweak my VM with all possible settings to favour performance over the last 1 year (Fit all into Ram, use host hard disk buffer, disable memory trimming / sharing etc...)

I can't uninstall SP1 any more as right after installing SP1, I do a clean up from the command line .

Anyone can tell me, how exactly do I report this problem ? Sending a log file ? from which location on my hard disk ?

PS: Excuse my English, English is not my first language.

[EtreLibre]

You can go here :

http://www.vmware.com/go/service-request

After login, click on "File Technical Support Request".

It will redirect you to :

https://eservice-prod-vip.vmware.com/eservice_enu/start.swe?SWEMethod=NewRecord&SWEApplet=VM+Contact...

Good luck

[piggyz]

I can confirm the problem too. VMware need to fix it, the quality of virtualization after SP1 is decreased, machines run slows and there is this memory problem 😞

[EdP2]

I can't uninstall SP1 any more as right after installing SP1, I do a clean up from the command line .

If I understand you correctly you cannot INSTALL SP1 any more. If this is your problem, try going to the following Technet link and search for Troubleshooting.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817650%28WS.10%29.aspx

If however you cannot UNINSTALL SP1 then open a Command Prompt with Administrator priviliges, and enter the following command:

Wusa.exe /uninstall /kb:976932

This takes a very long time to start the uninstall routine, and could take an hour or so to complete.

If however you have already removed your backup files then I'm sorry I do not know a way to help - you could try a system restore, but I am pessimistic about your success.

I hope this helps you.

[alexto]

Thanks EdP and EtreLibre

I would not want to uninstall SP1 anyway as I know eventually I will need to install it. Preferably to have a fix from VMware.

I experiment with my desktop (8GB Ram / 1TB 7200rpm Hard disk) and as expected, I have the same problem.

Just applied W7SP1 to my desktop this afternoon and problems arise. My VMs start to crawl sometimes and unusable (any guest OS).

Hope to see a fix soon

[EtreLibre]

EdP a écrit:

I can't uninstall SP1 any more as right after installing SP1, I do a clean up from the command line .

If I understand you correctly you cannot INSTALL SP1 any more. If this is your problem, try going to the following Technet link and search for Troubleshooting.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff817650%28WS.10%29.aspx

If however you cannot UNINSTALL SP1 then open a Command Prompt with Administrator priviliges, and enter the following command:

Wusa.exe /uninstall /kb:976932

This takes a very long time to start the uninstall routine, and could take an hour or so to complete.

If however you have already removed your backup files then I'm sorry I do not know a way to help - you could try a system restore, but I am pessimistic about your success.

I hope this helps you.

He can't do it because he have cleaned up the SP1 with the command line :

DISM /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

And me too... I can't uninstall SP1, so I hope VMware will fix it

[piggyz]

I'm surely they will. This definitely is a MAJOR issue! BTW, VirtualBOX, I do use on another system, is absolutely not affected by the problem.

[EdP2]

For what its worth 'doctor' on techrepublic

http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/discussions/102-341616-3422086

posted the following:

SP1 and VMware workstation

After we installed SP1 on several W7 and WS2008R2 hosts  with VMware wksta 7.1.3 (build 324285) we encountered problems running  multiple VMs on them - especially when more than ~70% of physical memory  is occupied by VMs, they start crashing into BSOD soon, while VMware  complains something about failed memory allocation. Adding more RAM into  host or stopping some guests in order to free some additional memory  fixed the problem.

I think the quoted 70% may be at a much lower figure for some workstation configurations, and would be better expressed as an absolute free memory number. Whatever it is, it is orders of magnitude lower than the pre-SP1 number. Hopefully VMware will take this anti-competitive move up with Microsoft with a high degree of urgency, as I suspect it is not a VMWare code issue.