Fusion Pro 11 performance with MacOS Mojave Troubles

[ITdojo]

I have been a Fusion Pro user for many years.  I frequently run Debian or Ubuntu 64-bit guests on a MacOS host.  Sometimes I run just one VM at a time, other times I run a few.  Everything has been pretty great for the past few years ...until either MacOS Mojave or Fusion Pro 11 came along (or both).  Now I'm having a really tough time.

I currently have a 2018 MacBook Pro Core i9 with 32GB RAM, a 1TB SSD and Radeon Pro 560X.  I also have a 2012 iMac Core i7 with 32GB RAM and Nvidia GTX 680MX.  Both run MacOS Mojave (10.14)

My iMac (and previous MacBook Pro) had been running MacOS High Sierra and Fusion Pro 10 for the past few months without issue and my new MacBook only ran Fusion Pro 10 for a few days before Fusion Pro 11 came out.  It has been downhill ever since.

Both computers are now running MacOS Mojave with Fusion Pro 11 and my VMs are really hard to work with on both machines.  The guests behave otherwise normally unless I let them sit idle for several minutes and then I get the spinning beach ball when trying to interact with them again.  It takes anywhere from 30-40 seconds to a few minutes for the VMs to start responding to me again.

Most of the time it takes so long for them to respond that I end up force-quitting Fusion.  When I open it back up, the VMs are still running and are responsive again (which I find odd because they aren't resuming; they are just still there running)... until a I let them sit idle again and then it's back to beach ball time.

I have tinkered with the guest RAM and processor settings on several different VMs.  I have also tinkered with the sleep and automatic suspend settings on the guests.  All to no avail.  I have been running VMs like this for years with few to no problems and certainly nothing like this.

I have tried open-vm-tools and the VMWare Tools on different VMs to see if they offered any differences (uninstalling the other each time before switching).  They don't help.  In previous versions of Fusion I have been using open-vm-tools with great success but now it's buggy (I had to write a script to restart open-vm-tools at login in order to get the screen to resize when dragging by the corners).  VMWare Tools hasn't worked for me in a long time and when I tried it again with Fusion Pro 11 I met the same lack of success.  It installs fine but my screen won't resize and I can't get an actual full-screen mode to work (with VMWare Tools).

Is anyone else experiencing this slow performance with Fusion Pro 11 and MacOS Mojave combined?

If anyone has any suggestions on how I might fix the problem I'll be incredibly grateful.  The situation I've got now has me wondering if I need to try falling back to Fusion Pro 10 or High Sierra.  I really don't want to do that.

Thanks, in advance, for any help you can offer.

CW.

Message was edited by: ITdojo - corrected a typo.

[RickShu]

Hi ITdojo,

There is something special for Mojave host, please check System Preferences ==>Security&Privacy==>Privacy==>Accessibility, make sure you have added Fusion into the list. Then please quit Fusion and restart it to see if it helps.

Regards,

-Rick

[ITdojo]

Thanks.  I should have mentioned in my original post that I already made sure that Fusion is checked in the Accessibility options.  That has been enabled since it asked for it during installation.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I think a lot of this is Mojave itself, and it's worst on the 2018's.   I get far more beachballs across the board with that particular combination than I ever did with high sierra on 2017.  My 2017 on Mojave has some, but not to the extent of the 2018.  It's particularly noticeable at boot time - you have to wait for the system to stabilize for a couple of minutes after boot up, otherwise your apps just sit there and bounce for a very long time.  Ironically my 2017 13 2-core is *faster* to boot and stabilize than my 2018 6-core.  I regularly have apps lock up completely, sometimes so bad that a reboot is required (and running headlong into the boot problem).

We've seen that one multiple machines, and actually had to send back two 2018's for defective hardware.  I don't think either the machines or the OS was fully baked this go around.

Feels like my pre-mac days when we'd go have a cup of coffee while the computer booted up.

[ITdojo]

You sure are right about the 2018 MBP being less than impressive compared to its listed specs.  I have been underwhelmed and have experienced similar issues outside of the problems I am having with Fusion.  I upgraded from a 2012 MBP that was flawless for nearly six years.  It's pretty disappointing considering how much this 2018 took from my bank account.

I don't really have time in my day to do it but I guess I'll put Fusion Pro 11 and High Sierra on my old 2012 MBP and see if that's a happier marriage.  If that proves fruitful I'll see what happens with Fusion Pro 10 on Mojave on my 2018.  Ugh... playing mix & match with Apple & VMWare  to find a working combo isn't what i wanted to do with my weekend.

Thanks for the input.

[lundman]

OSX 10.13.6 Mac Pro (Trashcan) been running Fusion 10 for many months doing Window Kernel development, so two Win10 VMs, one as target.  After updating to Fusion 11, the VMs run fine on their own, but as soon as I start the kernel debugger and they talk to each other, I get large pauses, 30s or more. The only thing that changed is upgrading to Fusion 11. (VMs are always rolled-back to snapshot after each code test).

No Mojave involved here, but adding weight to that something is slow with Fusion 11.

[mivym]

I have the same exact problem running Mojave 10.14 with Fusion Pro 11.0 on iMac 27" late 2013.

Privacy settings were set since install.

Sometimes the beachball spins endlessly and I have to force quit Fusion and resume where it left off. Other times Fusion crashes complitely and I have to reboot the guest VM, which is running linux kernel 4.3 with open vm tools installed. Setting guest vm to windowed instead of fullscreen does not have any effect. At first I thought the problem got triggered when switching workplaces in Mojave but that is not the case as I just left the VM running without sleep for an entire night and when i got back to it, the beachball started spinning and VM was unresponsive which led me to force quit once again. Like OP, I've also experienced issues with guest resolution not adapting to resolution dynamically. For me, this was solved by installing the VM tools that come with Fusion.

UPDATE: I may have found a fixbut im not 100% sure yet as my VM has only been running for a few hours. However so far so good.

Try the following: System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Microphone -> Tick VMware Fusion

This privacy setting is a new feature in Mojave and is causing all sorts of problems with apps that has the option to access mic.

Let me know if that helps.

UPDATE: Problem came back.

[ITdojo]

I'll give that microphone option a try.  Thanks!

For now I moved my iMac back to Fusion Pro 10 and it seems to be much happier.  I'm going to try your microphone solution on my MBP (which still have Fusion Pro 11) and report back.

I also submitted a help ticket to VMWare along with a Crash/Hang troubleshooting file, too.

[ITdojo]

No love on the microphone solution.  It was already enabled/allowed on my MBP with Fusion Pro 11 and I'm still dealing with full non-responsive systems.  I can't even get the Apple icon to respond to me unless I can manage to get another app to come to the foreground so I can get to the Force Quit menu.  If I can get to that menu, Fusion always shows as Not Responding. After force quitting the Fusion Pro 11 app I can immediately reopen to find the VM still running and fully responsive. ... until next time. 

With two VM's open on each computer (copies of the same VM's on two different machines) I can say that MacOS Mojave with Fusion Pro 10 is running otherwise fine.  Fusion Pro 11 on MacOS Mojave is still a mess.  I am generating another crash/hang log on my MBP to upload to VMWare.  Hopefully it will have useful information for them.

For now, I'd encourage folks to stick with Fusion Pro 10 if they are going to use MacOS Mojave.  I'm not sure it's the 1,2 punch of Mojave and Fusion Pro 11 or if its just Fusion Pro but at least I can say that Fusion Pro 10 and Mojave seem to be getting along. 

Side note:  Before reverting back to Fusion Pro 10 I tried downgrading all of my VMs to hardware version 14 on Fusion Pro 11.  It had no impact on the problem.

[ITdojo]

Darn it.  I have take back what I wrote about MacOS Mojave and Fusion Pro 10 being happy with each other.  I woke up this morning to spinning beach balls on my FP 10 VMs, too.  So now I'm nearly back to square one.  MacOS Mojave and Fusion just aren't playing nicely with each other with either FP10 or FP11.

I have sent crash files to VMWare.

[mivym]

Dang, really? I just downgraded to fusion 10 as the spinning ball came back :smileyangry:

[mivym]

Perhaps something off with Mojave: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/9iqkue/mojave_is_locking_up_and_spinning_beach_ball_of/

[ColoradoMarmot]

Mojave definitely isn't fully baked.  I'm having issues on both the 2018 and 2017 machines - long boot times, frequent beachballs and lockups.  Hopefully it'll be fixed in .1.   I don't think it's Fusion itself.  I have a suspicion that it's related to some of the new security features, particularly accessibility restrictions, but can't confirm.

[ITdojo]

Thanks.

I agree about Mojave being complicit (if not fully culpable) in the problem(s), especially since Fusion Pro 10 is wonky for me on Mojave, too.  On my iMac, the only variable that is different when running FP10 is Mojave so that sort of points a pretty incriminating finger at Apple.  Fusion Pro 10 was otherwise problem-free for me on High Sierra.  Like many others have experienced, Mojave has given me problems here and there but the issues I am having with VMWare make them all trivial in comparison.  And like the obedient Apple fanboy that I am, I just patiently wait for Apple to release an update that makes everything all better again.  But if these Fusion problems are related to increased security features in MacOS, it's going to be up to VMWare to figure out how to work with them because Apple isn't likely to step off their security posture.

At this point I'm just hoping to be able to provide VMWare with enough logging/debugging info as I can to help them do what they can on their side. 

CW

[c6ten]

I'm running Fusion 11 on macOS Mojave. I can't speak directly to the issue of running a High Sierra guest OS but beach balling is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed. I think the APFS upgrade has been problematic, I'm having issues of my own. However I don't think they're related to vmware, and you should consider an SMC and PRAM reset, beach ballng is not normal.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Yeah, I have other software having the same issues (in fact, if you leave the security option in accessibility checked it completely locks up).  That's what makes me think it's about the security features - if so, it's a lot of vendors that have the problem.  But that may just be a coincidence.  There's a growing number of reports/complaints about Mojave across the net.

And I just had a High Sierra machine brick and require a reinstall after applying the 2018 supplemental patch.  Apple really needs to spend some of their cash horde on better QA (and a new brain for Siri!).

[underclouds]

I'm experiencing something similar, and I'm pretty sure the issue is with Fusion rather than Mojave itself. Whenever I try to run a VM in Fusion, the system becomes laggy, there periods when it is totally unresponsive for a minute or so, etc. Parallels and VirtualBox are doing just fine though...

[MatoHP]

I've the same issue as OP described, mostly noticeable on Windows 7 guests. Setup is Mojave 10.14 and fusion  11.0.0 (10120384). Similarly I've upgraded both fusion and osx close to each other so I can't really tell. I wonder if it has something to do with CVE-2018-5407 too.

I'm planning to downgrade fusion first and then osx. I will update this thread with my findings. I just wanted to say I've the same (very annoying) problem.

[ITdojo]

I have been working this with VMWare's tech support and they have been helpful and responsive, which I appreciate.

I did a WebEx session with one of their support reps and he looked around and under Advanced he set the option to pass Power Status to VM.  Testing after that show no positive benefit.  No love there.

The iMac I am still running Mojave on that I downgraded to Fusion Pro 10 has been WAY more stable that the machine running FP 11.  It's night and day, the difference.

After telling the rep that I was ready to throw in the towel and downgrade everything back to FP10 he told me this:

"Also, in the past we have seen Metal Renderer (Graphics) on the latest Mac hardware sometimes causes performance degradation in VMware Fusion. Could you please add the below lines to your vmx so that it suppresses the Metal and uses OpenGL for GPU in VM, update us the results :

- Ensure the virtual machine is shut down (not suspended).

- In VMware Fusion, from the Apple menu bar, go to Window > Virtual Machine Library.

Note: If the virtual machine is encrypted, you need to click on settings and enter the password when prompted.

- Hold the Option (Alt) key and right-click the virtual machine. Select Open Config File in Editor.

To open the .vmx in TextEdit in Fusion 4.x and above:

    Select Show in Finder

    Right-click the virtual machine and select Show package Contents

    Locate the .vmx file and open it in a text editor.

- Add the below lines to vmx :

mks.enableMTLRenderer = "FALSE"

mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

Note: While editing the .vmx file in TextEdit, disable Smart Quotes option from TextEdit > Preferences > New Document. Smart quotes, if enabled, will not work in the .vmx file and the virtual machine will fail to boot.

- When finished, close the window which auto-saves it."

This seemed to make a difference.  It hasn't been perfect but I was coming back to an otherwise frozen computer every time I walked away from a running VM.  With the disabling of Metal as the renderer it seemed to make things a lot more stable.  I thought it may have been the solution but today I was noticing a 15-20 second lag (spinning beach ball) again.  But the systems did start to respond again and I haven't had to Force Quit FP11 since making this change on my laptop.

The other interesting thing is that the system seems to be less stable when running a Kali VM (2018.3 or 2018.4).  With the change to OpenGL as renderer I have found that running a PoPOS VM, an Ubuntu VM, a Windows 10 VM (simultaneously) all stay responsive and otherwise happy.  For reasons unknown Kali seems to destabilize things more than other VMs.  My rep was quick to point out that Kali is not a supported VM, of course.  But I pointed out to him that I have been running Kali versions in both Fusion and VirtualBox for many years without issue and only had problem starting with FP11.

Finally, another oddity is that in my setting under Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility I have had VMWare Fusion enabled.  But I have randomly had an additional prompt asking to allow 'VMware-vmx' access, too.  I granted it but I'm not sure why it didn't come up during installation.  Has anyone else seen this (or know how this is different than the VMWare Fusion option being enabled?

If anyone else cares to try this please let me know how it works for you.

Good luck,

C.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Very interesting...is that just on the iMac?  What GPU does it have?