Hi,
I am running a Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit guest on a Win 7 host. The UI responds sluggish in many situations (for instance window resize, or dragging windows around). This seems to be partly a general issue with Unity in 14.04 and it's higher requirements but should not be any problem on the hardware i am running on (see details below).
For instance resizing a simple nautilus (file-manager) window by dragging the corner around freezes the system (half a second longer than the actual action is performed) and spikes host CPU usage to 100%. Viewing the cpu load inside the guest i see Xorg at 70%, nautilus 50% and compiz 20%. When dragging around a nautilus window (just moving the window) host uses 30% CPU, compiz 40% and Xorg 25%. The UI responds better if i disconnect the external displays (display port & vga via docking station) but still not satisfactory. If 3D acceleration is disabled for the VM the UI is even more responsive but then the CPU usage is extremly high even for scrolling pages, dragging windows.
As Ubuntu 14.04 is a supported guest OS for VMware Workstation i hope somebody here can direct me to a solution. The guest was installed from 14.04.1 using the auto-installer. vmware-tools active. I also tried several workaround such as setting low gfx for unity (comment 15 in [1]), updating to the most recent LTS kernel (14.04.2) [2], disabling animations via CompizConfig Settings Manager or using most recent vmware tools.
I am running VMware Workstation 11.1.0 build-2496824 on a 64bit Windows 7 Host on an ThinkPad X230 with Core i7-3520M CPU @ 2.90GHz and 8GB RAM.
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/compiz/+bug/1293384
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack#Desktop
P.S.: As a side note i also frequently experience weirdly set resolutions i.e. the workstation windows shows scroll bars and the guest seems to use a far higher resolution than necessary. This often can only be changed by switching to fullscreen and cycling monitors several times. From time to time a warning is displayed that the guest can not be set to the resolution which leaves the ubuntu unusable (no menue or launcher is shown).
