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.

[Myk321]

Same issues as above - jonahbenton resolved it - thank-you!  VMWare Fusion 11.02 on MacOs 10.14.3 Mojave running Fedora 29 as guest with kernel 4.20.8

[mchu]

I've also been experiencing hesitation (with beach ball) in Windows 10 VM on Mojave using Fusion 11. 

I did the following and it appears to have stabilized things for the last 3 days.

Processors & Memory / Advanced Options / Enable Hypervisor ... (disable)

Processors & Memory / Advanced Options / Enable code profiling ... (disable)

Processors & Memory / Advanced Options / Enable IOMMU ... (disable)

Advanced / Pass Power to VM (enable)

Sharing / Enable Shared Folders (disable)

Display / Accelerate 3d Graphics (disable)

Printer / Share Mac printers with Windows (disable)

I suspect it was one of these but I haven't had the chance to whack-a-mole it.

[maigais]

Same issues as described

Fusion 10.1.5

Mojave 10.14.3

MPB 2018 Nov 6cores, 32gb ramz

Edit #1

Did upgrade to 11.0.2 and disabled all options as above, it is better, however it always slows down moving from one VM screen to other.

Edit #2

Doing config bellow (please see posts back) seemed to resolved my pain.

- Add the below lines to vmx :

mks.enableMTLRenderer = "FALSE"

mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

[kopthat]

I have a Late 2013 27" iMac 3.2 GHz i5 with 16 GB RAM

I was using Fusion 8.5 on a Windows XP (1 core 3 GB RAM) and a Windows 10 (2 cores 6 GB RAM)

and all working well on High Sierra, but the I upgraded to Mojave and keep getting beach balls

not as often with one WM open

I have since upgraded to 11, but only installed 10.1.5 and it 's not much better.

I have tried removing all the 3D acceleration etc

but not these setting yet

- Add the below lines to vmx :

mks.enableMTLRenderer = "FALSE"

mks.enableGLRenderer = "TRUE"

I was thinking of getting another 2 x 8 GB to increase it to 24 GB do you think that will help ?

[maigais]

First of all I am not expert in these things, but from my n=1

I believe OSX with VMWares is better with more RAM. Windows with 16GB ram will easy run 2 VMwares, in my experience OSX will struggle.

Obviously I assume you have SSD.

[kopthat]

This was one of the first thin iMac and is not really serviceable so it has a 1TB SATA drive

How would it go on an external SSD, from memory this only has USB 2 or Fire Wire

so would that have the through put for an SSD ?

Got my answer:

There won't be any benefit to using the SSD on USB2—USB2 can't even keep up with a reasonably speedy spinning mechanical disk, much less a solid state one. The only reason to spring for the SSD and a USB3 case is if you intend to upgrade that machine relatively soon, and can then take advantage of the extra speed and faster interface. The situation with FW800 is marginally better, but any modern SSD is still several times faster than FW800 can support.

My iMac does have USB 3.0

This model has a 27" 2560x1440 LED-backlit 16:9 widescreen IPS display with the "cover glass fully laminated to the LCD and anti-reflective coating." The rear of the case is aluminum and is thicker in the middle and tapers to a razor thin 5 mm at the edges.

Connectivity includes four USB 3.0 ports, dual Thunderbolt ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi (802.11a/b/g/n compatible), and Bluetooth 4.0.

[maigais]

Sorry mate, you will have to do your own research on this one.

[kopthat]

I think Mojave is the problem even my 2017 27" iMac 8 GB RAM with a fusion drive get beach balls

when running Windows 10 in VMare Fusion

[Borgo1971]

I had the same problem, after I upgraded to Mojave (converting my fusion drive to APFS) and upgraded VMware Fusion from 8.x to 11.x. Even in VMware Fusion 8.x, where Windows 10 wasn't supported, I didn't have any problem before the macOS+Fusion upgrades.

But I invite you and all the people that experience this issue to contact VMware support ( https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-help/ ), tell them about your experience and give all the reports you can (starting reading this: VMware Knowledge Base ), as I did. I hope and think I've solved the issue thanks to VMware support that called me and interacted about two hours after I opened a ticket and provided the data they requested. They invited me to do more things, so I can't say what was the mistake in my Mac or my VM. And I added some maintenance operation on my Mac too... mybe, they helped too. But for now (I'll write again if somthing changes), VM resumes pretty fast. So, what I did?

- I clered the VM with Windows tool, and after with VMware settings (so, this made I more times before, but didn't help alone)

- I cleared all VMware files around my disk with AppCleaner.

- I installed newly VMware Fusion and repaired the tools in Windows.

- I made a new VM taking a copy form VirtualDisk in my previous VM (until here, are VMware support suggestions, the next things are my idea)

- I cleaned boot caches restarting the Mac with shift key pressed

- I enabled trim on my SSD part from fusion drive (that's my main boot disk)

As I said, now VM's resumes as fast as they did in HighSierra and HFS+...

[AtlantaRenegade]

I have experienced a similar problem. Like others in the thread, I was suspected this may be a problem with APFS.  I experienced my slowdowns with both my Windows 10s and Linux 64-bit VMs. I am currently testing by a possible workaround by editing my .vmx file. When editing the VMX file, make sure to power down and make a snapshot of your VM before performing edits. I switched the SCSI virtual device driver from LSI Logic to Paravirtual. For example:

scsi0.virtualDev = "lsilogic" --> scsi0.virtualDev = "pvscsi"

Assuming the VMware tools is update to date, Windows 10 appears to support this driver and was automatically recognized by my Linux installations.

I was wondering if others can test this and their outcome?

[Borgo1971]

Unfortunately I'm here again, because after a few days where the VM resumed up really fast, today the problem reappeared it took 27 minutes. I invite all that experience this issue, to open a ticket at VMware to let developers know how widespread the problem is, and better targeting they efforts.

[MatoHP]

I really didn't have time to go through the VMware tech support ( at work we use ESXs as may corporations do -- it was hell and in the end they didn't help at all ). And we pay lots of money there.

With single user license my hopes are really small to none for them to solve this issue (which is probably more complex).

This is why I chose to rollback both OSX to High Sierra (10.13.6) and VMware fusion (10.1.5) and I have no problems.

For anyone who really needs VMware@osx it's really the path of least resistance.

[Borgo1971]

In my case VMware support was patient and courteous, even not decisive, but I guess I have solved the slow resume problem. What I did? I've converted back my main drive (homemade fusion drive where I hold system, application and virtual machines) to HFS+. Since I converted the drive, and now it's past about three weeks, VM's resumes normally fast. And this holding macOS Mojave and VMware Fusion 11.0.2 (to convert the drive, I cloned it with CarbonCopyCloner, initialised the drive, and cloned entry drive back).

[maigais]

thnx for hint re HFS+. I have created separate patrition with HFS+ and moved VMWares over. So far looks good. Will report back when have tested more

UPDATE: having vmwares on separate HFS+ patrition has resolved my issues

[SBiggs]

I can second this, I have a 2018 MAcbook pro running the latest mojave and Fusion. 32GB RAM so that's not the issue and the VMs are unusable if situated on a APFS formatted drive. HFS resolves the issue so I just created a seperate partition.

I also get the same issue when running VMs from an external SSD with a seperate install of Mojave and Fusion which I use for some malware analysis work.

The issue I now have is that you can't install Mojave easily on a non APFS formatted drive and the App Store link for High Sierra no longer works on Mojave so I can't roll High Sierra easliy on my external and to be honest I don't think i should have too.  Fusion is a specific Apple product and APFS is cllearly the way they are going and is going to be completely un-avoidable going forward so it isn't like it is a lit

VMware need to acknowledge the issue is with them and APFS and get it sorted. I am seriously considering moving to a different hypervisor product.

[pmcgrath]

I've now given up on this problem.   Fusion for me is now unusable on my MBP.   Really poor experience, with little guidance from VMware.

Switched to Parallels, and am functional again on my Windows10 VM.  

[MatoHP]

So we have Mar 2021 now. Do you guys know if the issue is solved now ? As I mentioned in 2019 the only thing working for me was downgrade. And Apple hates that a lot. I was lucky enough to have the High Sierra VM and hence was able to download the installation files to actually do the downgrade.

I'm on 10.13.6 (17G14042) , Fusion 10.1.6 (12989998).

I was thinking about upgrading to Mojave. This thread is dead now, not sure if people solved it or let it be.

[ColoradoMarmot]

The APFS issue was solved long ago - but if you're upgrading, you'll want to go beyond Mojave and Fusion 10 (Mojave will lose support this fall).  Get at least to Catalina and Fusion 11.5.

[MatoHP]

While this is obvious to many I guess there might still be people like me who held back their setup because of this bug. I like to do a follow up on older threads I asked something.

I tested it first and later did a fresh install of Catalina. Indeed it seems this bug is solved now. I've seen no issues past this week or so running several VMs doing their job. I think (subjective though) that network performance got better with newer os/fusion.

@ColoradoMarmotI was little bit hesitant to go to Catalina and loose 32b support but then most of the things I do involve qemu/fusion where I don't have problems. I'm conservative though, I didn't jump to BigSur. But I bought Fusion 12;-)

[ColoradoMarmot]

Understand, my family usually waits until the last release of an OS to upgrade.  Apples quality has gotten really sketchy over the past few versions....