Workstation 11 .0.0 Build-2305329 hangs - Win 8.1 host

[TkPk]

Hello.  I have a new Dell Inspiron 3847 (i5-4460) with 16G RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4600 with 10.18.10.3960 driver, Windows 8.1 and am trying to run Workstation 11.

The only other applications installed (other than the bloatware that came on the box) on the host are Norton Security, Chrome and CrashPlan, which has backup of the Virtual Machine directory excluded.

The problem is that the Workstation app shows "not responding" often and the guests hang.  After a couple minutes, it all comes back to life.  I'm running between 1 and 3 guests, all either win 7 or win 8.1.

Where should I look to begin to troubleshoot this.  I would have expected this setup to be somewhat responsive.  I've looked at other posts and have disabled "Accelerate 3D graphics" on all 3 VMs.

Thanks

[WhiteKnight]

I've been cloning my VM to the C: drive for a couple of days now. Neither had any hickups nor latency yet.

Didn't have a chance to work in Visual Studio, though, as I'm currently reading through new Microsoft specs.

I'll keep you updated ...

[WhiteKnight]

After removing ShellyCat's workaround, the guest still hangs from time to time, even on my C: partition. Mainly when accessing the disk drive.

[shellycat]

All is stable for me, no hang in a long while. I'm taking debugging off, and have reverted processor settings to "Automatic" and that makes no difference.

Thread https://communities.vmware.com/thread/502194 is interesting - a dfferent way of addressing the problem.

[WhiteKnight]

Gee, interesting ...

I believe we can safely assume now that there is something wrong with Workstation 11.

I suspect VMware developers are strongly suggested now to put their heads together to get both issues (occasional hanging and occasional poor performance) fixed with the next update.

[munrobasher]

WhiteKnight wrote:

I believe we can safely assume now that there is something wrong with Workstation 11.

Yes, I suspect it's safe to say this. I had to go away to do something else because VMware Workstation decided to start thrashing the VMEM files for 15+ minutes. In that time, one could have written over a 100GB to my E: drive assuming sequential writing speeds or 65GB under normal load. It feels like it's writing far too much to the VMEM file at very high rates and whilst that is happening, the host is pretty unresponsive.

Cheers, Rob.

[DavidinCT]

I have been dealing with this lockup on Windows 7 (64bit) and Windows 8 (64bit). I am done, I cant get any work done with the Workstation freezing up for 3-4 min every 1/2 to an hour.

How does one take a VM that was done in  11 and convert it to a 10 so I can reinstall 10 so I can actually get some work done ????

[briangideon]

I wasn't aware of this thread before I posted a question regarding the VMEM file earlier this evening. I too am having problems that I have tracked down to thrashing of the VMEM file. In my case resuming from a suspend can force the problem almost all of the time. Adding mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE" to the vmx file seems to have solved my guest lock up issues.

[munrobasher]

I've been running with the useNamedFile workaround for several months now and performance is much improved. This problem isn't new - it's reported on this web page from v7:

https://olafd.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/heavy-disk-io-after-shutdown-in-vmware-workstation/

Don't forget the configuration file edit so that new VMs inherit this switch:

Maximize VMWare images performance

Cheers, Rob.

BTW - this editor really sucks on IE11. Doesn't insert hyperlinks in the right place (always goes to top) and copy & paste doesn't work. Had to switch to Chrome...

[munrobasher]

For me, the fix might not actually have been a fix. When MainMem.useNamedFile = "false" is used, it instructs VMware Workstation to use the Windows page file for it's virtual memory and not it's own VMEM file in the VM's folder.

On my system, that's effectively moving from a slower albeit perfectly reasonable SATA-3 disk to a high speed SSD. This alone will give a huge speed increase so it's possible there is still a problem but it's now masked by being on a much faster disk.

This issue was never as problematic for me until v11 so I suspect that something that may have been a problem before with slower disks (somebody reports working of external USB) is now manifesting itself in a much more prominent way. As other's have remarked, there is a lot of disk activity on the VMEM file but the throughput to/from disk itself is relatively low. Make of that what you will... it's like Workstation is issuing lots of disk commands that actually don't result in data being read or written. Quite bizarre.

Cheers, Rob.

[kenny558]

I'm experiencing the same problem here. Using only windows 8.1 64bits (NOT windows 8.1 Pro).

Windows 7 pro has no problem at all.

[adobepro]

I know this is an old thread, but in case if anyone is having this issue, like I had, what I did to resolve this was defragment my VM via vmware.

My setup is Windows 7 host, running to VM 11 Workstations, one Windows and one Linux/Centos. Both VM's on separate SSD drives. What would happen is at random, I would hear a beep from the VM, like it detected a USB device and then the VM would become unresponsive -- but no usb devices were added. When the vmware workstation became unresponsive, I would have to kill the vm interface, delete the locks, open vmware again and reattach, then immediately shutdown the VMs. When I started up on VM, it said I should defragment it for better performance, and sure enough, once I did that, I didn't get this again.