Fusion 8.5.3 + macOS 10.12.3 = Intermittent VM hangs

[simplychris]

I'm encountering an intermittent hanging of virtual machines when running 8.5.3 in macOS 10.12.3.

This has been occurring on and off since 10.12.0 and 8.5.

This VM is used by multiple people for Microsoft RDC. When the issue is reported, I can usually find the VM in a "half-hung" or completely hung state.

Half-hung is peculiar. The application window for the virtual machine is unresponsive and presents the pinwheel cursor as soon as the mouse hovers over it, however, the virtual machine is still reachable. Users can connect via RDC and work as expected. Force quitting VMware will of course interrupt the sessions, but upon relaunching the VM just picks up EXACTLY where it left off. There's no resume or boot process and it appears to function as normal.

The completely hung state is much more atrocious. The virtual machine application window is unresponsive, users cannot RDC, force quitting and relaunching will, again, bring the VM exactly back to the point it left off at, but will also require a restart of the guest OS before users are able to reconnect.

Thoughts?

[nancyz]

Hi simplychris

Welcome to Fusion community.

How many processors and memory did you allocate to your VM? You can get this information via VM settings->Processors and Memory. Thanks.

[simplychris]

2 "processors" and 8GB of RAM are allocated to the VM.

Host is an Intel Core i7 3 GHz (2 core 1 processor) Mac mini with 16GB of RAM.

[RDPetruska]

A good rule of thumb is to always keep your virtual machines' vCPUs to at least one less than your host's CPUs/cores.  Otherwise, you will be starving the host.  In your case, with only 2 cores in your host, I wouldn't run any VM with more than 1 vCPU/core.

[simplychris]

Despite having adjusted the vCPU/core to 1 (down from 2), I'm still experiencing intermittent beachballing EXCLUSIVELY from the VMware Fusion app.

It's acting up right now, if there's any logs I can pull or check while the application is not responding (despite the VM still apparently running) to provide further insight, I'd be happy to do so.

[ColoradoMarmot]

What else is running on the mini in the background?

And how old is it?  Fusion can push failing hardware over the edge.

[wila]

Hi,

Not sure if it is your issue, but there have been a variety of reports lately on virtual machines slowing down due to free antivirus programs.

Worst offender being Avast, second in line AVG.

If running either of these two then for AVG I think only uninstall works and for Avast there's apparently a change in settings that can help.

--

Wil