Suspend and resume is broken in Workstation 8

[jtech201110141]

Upgraded to Workstation 8 from Workstation 7.1.4.. When I power on the vm from powered off state, everything works OK. But when I suspend & resume vm, graphics performance is horrible. Scrolling web page in Firefox is very slow. I've to power off and power on the vm to get back good graphics performance. If I change vm tab on workstation 8 toolbar it causes also slow graphics performance. Good graphics performance is restored when I power off and power on the vm.

guest - ubuntu 10.04 x64 desktop, 1 GB ram, 1 cpu

host - windows 7 ultimate sp1 x64, 8 GB ram, geforce 580 gpu, intel 320 160gb ssd

Check out following links. Suspend & tab switching problem bothers other Workstation 8 users as well.

Suspend & resume -bug, with various virtual machines:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/328721?tstart=0

Tab switching bug causes bad graphics performance:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1828550#1828550

Detailed steps to reproduce suspend-bug on windows 7 vm:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1830169#1830169

First bug (suspend bug) & steps to reproduce:

• Install Ubuntu 10.04 desktop x64 guest on VMware Workstation 8.
• Suspend & resume the vm.
• After resuming, poor graphics performance on the vm. This is visible when you fast scroll web pages with firefox or chrome browser.
• But if you power off and then power on the vm, it's all right.

Second bug (tab switching bug) & steps to reproduce:

• Install Ubuntu 10.04 desktop x64 guest on VMware Workstation 8.
• Switch to any other vm -tab on the tabs toolbar
• Switch back to Ubuntu vm -tab
• Notice the poor graphics performance of Ubuntu guest. This is visible when you fast scroll web pages with firefox or chrome browser.
• But if you power off and then power on the vm, it's all right.

VMware employee could join this discussion, reproduce, confirm, and report this bug to vmware dev-team. Hopefully VMware inspects these bugs, and releases patch for these bugs. If possible, Knowledge Base article with workaround would be very useful.

Can anyone help me, please?

added more details. Message was edited by: jtech

[jtech201110141]

Just installed workstation 8 into my ubuntu partition. No graphics performance problems so far with linux host.

Message was edited by: jtech

[jtech201110141]

Is there anybody out there?

[0WayneH0]

How long are you allowing between suspend and resume? I'm watching resource monitor for a suspended VM (which suspends very quickly) and there is still writing of stuff to disk going on. It wouldn't surprise me then if you tried to resume right after suspending that it would be slow (amazed it works). How much of a real use case is suspend, followed by instant resume?

If I suspend, wait 60 seconds then resume a Win7 x86 guest (on a very slow laptop) it works pretty well.

[continuum]

> If I suspend, wait 60 seconds then resume a Win7 x86 guest

that would not work here - I often need several minutes to suspend a VM - that seemed to work faster with the betas

[0WayneH0]

That would depend on few things though right? How much Vmem is assigned, what else the host is running etc. Either way, your point re-inforces mine; a quick suspend/resume test is not really going to turn out well without allowing the host time to commit the suspend to disk.

Cheers.

[jtech201110141]

0WayneH0 wrote:

How long are you allowing between suspend and resume?

Yesterday I suspended test-vm, left the host pc on for several hours and then resumed the test-vm. Problem is still alive.

0WayneH0 wrote:

If I suspend, wait 60 seconds then resume a Win7 x86 guest (on a very slow laptop) it works pretty well.

Doesn't work

[mdunn-vmware]

I'm looking at a bug that was reported internally that sounds similar to what you're seeing. Could you do these tests?

* Close all other tabs aside from the VM where you've seen the slowness.

* Close and re-run Workstation.

* Show then hide the thumbnail bar (View->Customize->Thumbnail bar). If you normally have the thumbnail bar showing, just hide it.

* Switch to summary view, then back to the console view (View->Console View).

If you're seeing the same bug, then after doing those steps, the VM should be responsive.  Thanks!

[0WayneH0]

Is this potentially also the video performance related issue from here?

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1834087#1834087

I followed your steps just then and it reverses the display performance issue that I can reproduce on multiple hosts in the above thread.

[jtech201110141]

Yes, your steps restore good graphics performance.

[JJoel42]

Thanks for confirming that this solved your problem mdunn has found the cause of the problem and I expect that it will be included in the next maintenance release.

[jakelauer]

I can't get this to work. Console view is grayed out for me. What's going on?

Edit: For other people who had the same issue as me, when you exit Workstation, choose Run in Background. Then when you start it up, the VM will still be open, which must be the case to open console view.