So I'm sitting here...

[neurofuzzy]

... staring at a basically frozen Windows 8 guest under Fusion 5 and Mavericks.

I seriously doubt VMware will patch it, and it looks like Fusion 6 has the same problems.

I guess it's time to look at other options.

[weinstein5]

Need some more information to help you troubleshoot - So you were able to successfully install Windows 8? How do you have the VM configured - memory and # vcpus? What are the physical resources of your MAC - memort and CPU?

[wila]

Hi,

If your VM is frozen, you might want to try a "forced shutdown".

In the Fusion VM menu you normally have the menu options "Suspend, restart, shutdown", but if your VM is locked up that might not work. While selecting the VM menu hold down your "option / alt" key on your keyboard and then select "Force  Shutdown".

hope this helps,

--

Wil

[neurofuzzy]

This is not a problem with the guest or my host. It's a problem with Fusion itself. It was working perfectly in OS X Lion, but an upgrade to Mavericks has caused Fusion to buck.

I've got a quad core i3 iMac with 8gb RAM. I've allocated 3gb to the guest and set it to use 2 cores.

I've noticed that now Fusion doesn't actually use two cores. Any activity like Windows Defender, any network activity, Dropbox, etc, will cause the guest to come to a screeching halt and act like an old pentium with 128k RAM. The mouse cursor will jerk, I can watch windows blank out and redraw, and Task Manager will show CPU spike and stick at 100%, even when it's doing basically NOTHING. It gets so bad that eventually the screen will either ghost or go black and I need to force shutdown. It's pathetic.

I've turned off all video acceleration and all shared folders.

VMware really needs to put out a patch for Fusion 5 to clear up these issues, or give us a discount for Fusion 6. I don't need any fancy "features". I just need to get work done.

[wila]

I suppose you wouldn't want to hear my advice after reading things like needing to "get work done"   so will not comment on that part.

One thing you might want to check into is disabling app nap, see also:

Re: App Nap core function in OS X Mavericks

If that doesn't help then you can try a reinstall of Fusion 5 on Mavericks.

Last option I can think of right now is rolling back to Lion which I'm guessing is not an option for you.

--

Wil

[neurofuzzy]

Thanks for the advice. I disabled App Nap for Fusion as soon as I upgraded to Mavericks.

[JoachimDV]

I have the same problem.

I have 2 macs, a macbook pro and an imac. The one was running VM 5.0.3 and office 2013 on Win 7. The other VM 6.0.2 and office 2010 on Win7.

Once upgraded to Mavericks the VM freezes. It starts when running a MS Office app, especially Outlook or Excel.

All of sudden, when clicking or typing the cursor freezes. The app becomes "not responding".
Sometimes, after a long period, the app comes to life again but most of the times i need to click on close, "end application" and then the WIN7 runs again.
I can restart the office app but after a few clicks it freezes again, freezing whole Win 7.

When frozen, the MACOS still works fine, so any app on another space can still be used. Only VM Fusion is not responding anymore.

Please update ? It definitely has to see something with the upgrade to Mavericks on both machines.

Cheers

Joachim

[wila]

Hello Joachim,

Well the other scenario that sometimes comes up with these type of issues is when an antivirus application is getting in the way. You can trying to disable it, but more often as not -if the antivirus is causing this behavior- an uninstall is what is needed to find out if it is the cause.

Personally I've had an issue with Windows Defender where it was scanning inside zip files on a vmware shared folder.

--

Wil

[neurofuzzy]

I've switched to VirtualBox and it runs much more smoothly. I don't do gaming, though.

One thing to note - VirtualBox had some of the same problems (chugging along, latent response time, but not the freezing) as Fusion when I initially created the VM. But, I noticed that I had it set to use only 1 processor core. I set it to two cores and now VirtualBox runs like a champ.

Fusion runs like crap on Mavericks no matter how many cores I throw at it. Which seems validate my original hypothesis, that Fusion under Mavericks can only use 1 core regardless of the VM settings or what the guest reports.

I've given up on VMware. Maybe I'll come back to it if I see these problems are resolved, they get better with support, stop releasing beta software as gold, and start pricing their "upgrades" more reasonably.