Very slow resume after upgrading to High Sierra and VMWare 10

[Cengiz123]

Resuming a CentOS 7 guest went up from seconds to minutes. I have an APFS SSD. Is there a known issue?

[Mohannad]

Tried the same thing including changing the to BIOS and this seems to work much better now. Not as fast as it used to be but substantially better. This really should be marked as best answer.

[Joey_sun]

VMware 10.1.2, slow since first day, made some adjustment as per another thread (forgot what that is) and improved for few days, then went back to mins long restoring again.

cannot find the bios thing in the options, and cannot create a HFS in cirrent APFS hard disck.

read all thread above and seems no answer, can someone change the status of this topic to unsolved?

[swierkowsky]

ditto.

None of the answers above fixed any of the issues. Win 10 still performs extremely poorly under newest version of Fusion (11.0.2) and the resume time from save state is a joke.

I also do not buy all the disk cache /vhw reconfig / tweaks stuff - this has to simply work out of the box with no tweaking required like with any other Vmware products I'm using (workstation mainly)

Whatever is causing disk I/O issues on Win 10 VMs running on Fusion on Filevault2-encrypted Macs has not been fixed since at lest 2 major Fusion releases....

[Borgo1971]

Really unhappy to be here write about this old issue, while I experience it yet now with may MacPro 5,1 with Fusion 11.0.2 and macOS 10.14.2 on home made fusion drive formatted APFS (not encrypted, btw.). I mean, will there never be a definitive solution?!

VMware should really investigate on this issue!

[billstclair]

I was getting the same problem in VMWare Fusion 11.0.2, with the VM stored on an AFS encrypted volume on an external USB 3 drive on a 2018 MacBook Air running Mojave (10.14.2).

Creating a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) disk image on that volume and copying the VM to there fixed it.

[Borgo1971]

I don't use FileVault... but since I upgraded to Mojave (that converted my fusion drive in APFS), resume time become a nightmare! I've got even more then 1 hour to resume Windows 10 VM with 4GB assigned ram, on my MacPro (model 5,1 / 6x3,33GHz / 24GB ram / 128+640 fusiondrive). With previous OSs and Fusion 8, it was never more than 30sec., but most times I think I was around 10sec.! And problems are not related only to Windows 10 VM... even the lighter Windows XP VM is visibly slower.

For now I'll avoid to suspend my VM's, but VMware must investigate this issue and find a patch for it soon, or at next upgrade I think I'll go to Parallels.

[achmac]

Me too. I upgraded to High Sierra. My VMware was Fusion 8. The resume suddenly was very slow.

I thaught, that upgrading Fusion 8 to the latest Version of Fusion 11 would correct this issue - but it doesn't!

When VMware isn't able to fix the Problem in the near future, i would possibly change to Parallels.

Regards

Achim

[jaraco]

The issue has returned for me.

[Borgo1971]

As I wrote, I have 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. And the problem is not only with my main virtual machine (borne with Windows 7 and upgraded to Windows 10 in Fusion 8.x), but even in lighter Windows XP VM (not as serious as with Windows 10 VM). I must say that's not an every time issue... sometime VM resumes normally, but sometimes Windows 10 VM need about an hour... really frustrating. And all computer becomes really slow in the meantime.

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. They are working on the issue, but more reports there are, and better and sooner they can solve the problem.

[ColoradoMarmot]

I wonder if this is related to snapshotting that's built into to APFS.  Do you use CCC and/or time machine?  If so, disable snapshots in CCC and turn off time machine, then see if the issue goes away.

[Borgo1971]

Yes, I use both: TimeMachine for a historical backup and CCC for a nightly clone from my Fusion drive (boot volume). I'm skeptical of whether TimeMachine or CCC has to do with the problem, but I'll try to disable them for a few days.

[Borgo1971]

I 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+...

[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.

[Borgo1971]

Hello to all. I hope to write in this thread for the last time, because I guess to have solved, or at last I have found a good workaround, for 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 is about two weeks, VM resumes normally fast.

[pr74]

Yes, the only solution seems to be avoiding APFS, especially on Fusion and normal hard drives as it creates highly fragmented files.

There's a really good article about it here:

https://eclecticlight.co/2017/11/19/last-week-on-my-mac-the-extent-of-apfss-problems/

I highly recommend watching Tim Standing's presentation mentioned at the beginning of the article, the crucial bit starts around 22nd minute or so.

[gadam]

Does anyone know if parallels has the same problem?

I'm seriously condidering to switch to it!

Gaetano

[ColoradoMarmot]

If you're using a Fusion drive, that's the root cause.  Change from a split disk to a single volume, which should prevent parts of the disk from being aged out to the metal drive.