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Luminatio
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VM became extremely slow after upgraded to macOS 10.14.6 [Officially Solved]

------------20190827--------------------------

This issue is officially solved with Apple’s macOS 10.14.6 supplemental update.

Thanks to all of you.

A thumb down to Apple’s software team...

————————

After I upgraded my 2 MBP to 10.14.6, all of the Windows VMs became extremely slow and stuck at the login screen...

The VMs are set to use TPM, I don't know if it's relevant.

Anyone came across the same situation?

Now I cannot continue my work...really frustrating...

—————20190727————-

I’m updating this for convenient reference.

Status: This issue has not been solved yet.

Many users encountered this issue which leads to completely unusable of VMs.

And we got some replies from Fusion developers, you could help developers identify issues by replying your hardware models/is disk encrypted or have the VM encrypted etc.

We have some reports that some users found out that if set the memory of VM to 2G could help.

Re: VM became extremely slow after upgraded to macOS 10.14.6

If you don’t need to use much memory and can work with it, you might try set the memory to 2G, or maybe less than 4G is also okay?

Still we are waiting for an official solution.

------------20190809--------------------------

Thanks to ksc

Re: VM became extremely slow after upgraded to macOS 10.14.6

I updated to Fusion 11.1.1, confirmed that I can login to the system, and desktop shows normally.

As ksc says, it is a workaround which I'm not quite sure if I can trust it to do my work in it....

At least, I'm able to get my works out and change to other options now.

I'll mark this issue as resolved for now, but keep the [Workaround Released] tag in the subject.

Looks like it would take quite some time for a real fix, I'll keep an eye on this.

消息编辑者为:Liam

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R3BOOOT
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Updated to Fusion 11.1.1 on Friday. I rebooted my iMac and the Win 10 VM (8gb ram) seem to be running fine afterwards.

This morning I noticed the fan on my iMac wouldn't slow down. The VM was performing poorly. I restarted iMac and VM again, and VM's performance came back again.

I'm lowering the RAM to 2GB to see if it helps. My VM is not encrypted.

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Jomos3500
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Set my virtual machines windows server 2008 encrypted and windows 10 un-encrypted to 2 GB of RAM and managed to solved the issue for me. I am using a late 2018 15" stock macbookpro. I am currently using both of them at the same time with no lag for the last 30 minutes.

Edit --- I am on VM Ware 10.1.6 ---

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kdekorte
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I have a 16GB MacBook Pro and today I was working with my 4GB Windows 10 VM. I had a few things opened, but memory usage still was not high. I opened Excel with a 50000 line CSV file and that caused the machine to start swap hell and basically the machine was dead at that point as it never recovered. This was on Fusion 11.1. I have now upgraded to 11.1.1 to see if that helps somewhat. I was able to re-enable accessibility so that appears to no longer be a problem or was a red-herring. I was holding off upgrading as my setup was working and 11.1.1 wasn't giving me a high confidence factor based on the comments in here.

I'm not doing anything heavy graphical (VS Code, Robo 3t, Firefox, and TeraData client) in the VM. But the VM is encrypted.

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lfreitag
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My Windows performance in Fusion is still slow and unusable.  The update did not help.  And of course I had just paid for Version 11.  Has anyone here tried Parallels 15?  I would prefer to stay with Fusion if anyone from VMware could give an estimate when this will be completely fixed---and soon.  Otherwise I will be forced to switch to Parallels next week or just give up on VM approach completely and buy a dedicated PC for my work needs.

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dscribellito
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Agreed, 11.1 does not address the performance issue even when dropping to 2GB of RAM and one core. The performance of the VM is still unusable.

DaveP
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I have done the following changes and my VMs are running fine without changing memory or CPU counts; e.g. 2 core, 8GB RAM macos Mojave, Linux Mint 19.2 and Windows 10 VMs.

This is a MacBook Pro 15" 2018 model:

  Model Name:    MacBook Pro

  Model Identifier:    MacBookPro15,1

  Processor Name:    Intel Core i7

  Processor Speed:    2.6 GHz

  Number of Processors:    1

  Total Number of Cores:    6

  L2 Cache (per Core):    256 KB

  L3 Cache:    9 MB

  Hyper-Threading Technology:    Enabled

  Memory:    16 GB

  • Fusion 11.1.1 installed
  • No VMware encypted VMs
  • SSD drive is encrypted ith Filevault 2
  • All VMDKs are 2GB split to try and avoid the 2GB file bug in macOS 10.14.1
  • Named VMEM file switched off by adding these 2 lines to ~/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/config (create it if it isn't present):

mainmem.backing = "swap"

mainmem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

  • Make sure this edit is done when VMware Fusion is not running

It may be also a good idea to reboot the Mac after doing this before starting VMware Fusion.

Two colleagues and myself have both tried this and we get good performance and CPU does not go to 100%.

Of course I cannot guarantee this will work for everyone but at least we have proved it works on this Macbook for 3 different users.

Gleamer
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This is exactly the behavior I am experiencing.  Every few minutes the VM freezes for 15-30 seconds.  Usually after that it comes back for a few seconds then is frozen for a few seconds.  Then everything is normal for 3-5 minutes.  Then back to the freeze.  This continually occurs such that using the VM is really, really painful (but sometimes I still need to use it since it is mission critical for me).

I am on Mac OS X 10.14.6 on a MacBook Pro 13" 2018 with Touch Bar and 2.7 GHz i7 with 16GB RAM

The VM is configured:

Fusion Version 11.1.1 (14328561)

2 cores - 4GB RAM

Windows 10 Enterprise v1803 Build 17134.885

150GB Disk

No Encryption

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wila
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Hi Gleamer,

Have you tried dropping the amount of RAM from 4GB to 2GB of RAM?

I am aware that it is a very low amount of RAM, but it is suggested as the current workaround. Hopefully it will mitigate the freeze every couple of minutes.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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Phil0063
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I just upgraded to 11.1.1 and changed RAM to 2GB.  I have seen no improvement over the prior version.  I can start Windows but it just sits there with no response and is unusable.

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Gleamer
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Reducing the amount of RAM allocated to the VM from 4GB to 2GB does seemed to have stopped the freezes.  I am looking forward to a permanent fix to replace the workaround.

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undo_newish
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You are a legend, DaveP​! Your workaround seems to work on my setup as well.

- split VMware files

- set the config entry

Now my Windows 7 guest with 10gig ram works normally again.

Reducing the guest to 2gig of memory works as well but then I can't do any work.

PS: The official vmware patch does not work for me and I don't have my vm encrypted.

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markroemers
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Hi VMware-people,

Does the code for macOS Catalina have this bug as well?

When is Fusion coming out for Catalina?

Regards Mark

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wila
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Hi Mark,

I don't work for VMware, however can tell you the following.

See reply 65 for an answer on if it also happens on macOS Catalina.

Snippet (emphasis mine):

The bad news is, it's very puzzling. What we know:

  • Encrypted VMs are hit worse than unencrypted VMs (which are also impacted).
  • 10.14 and 10.15 betas are impacted. 10.13 is not impacted.

So yes, it also happens on Catalina.

As for "when is Fusion coming out for Catalina"

It is a VMware policy not to comment on future features, release dates or policies.

So you can certainly ask, but don't count too much on getting a detailed answer.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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ColoradoMarmot
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I'll be very interested to see if we get a fix in the next beta drop.  If not, that bodes not well at all for GA.

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DaveP
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undo_newish That's good to hear. I am surprised nobody else has tried it.

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SpikeeFix
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Okay - I have a little different situation but thought I'd post in case someone else runs into this.


I just recently upgraded from a 2013 MBP running High Sierra and VMWare Fusion 8 to a 2019 MBP running Mojave. I know VMWare 8 is not supposed to be supported, but running Windows 7 VM on my 2013 was perfect and I have found that updating things just makes things worse (getting old!) Smiley Happy.

But when I started running the VM (I copied the file over) on the 2019 MBP (that I had set up from a backup of the 2013 MBP) with Mojave the VM would run the fans hot and CPU up at 100% + . I found this thread and did the following suggested workarounds:

Virtual Machine > Setting > Hard Disk > Unchecked "Split into multiple files"

And I believe that fixed my issue. I did also reinstall VMWare Tools, but was still having the issue after that.

Also - I had already previously limited the VM to 2GB memory and do not run it encrypted.

For what it's worth!

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ColoradoMarmot
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Fusion 8 isn't remotely supported on Mojave.  Fusion 10 isn't even supported, but mostly works.

Make sure you make regular backups of your VM if you're going to continue using Fusion 8 - and not via Time machine.  Shut it down and manually back it up.

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SpikeeFix
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Yes - always. And turns out this didn't solve the problem. But what I'm seeing is that VMWare 11 isn't working either and is causing the same problems, so I'm not sure I want to upgrade...

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ColoradoMarmot
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Best thing i can suggest is to download the trial of 11 and see if that helps.  The net of the reports are that the .1 fix brings encrypted VM's up to the performance of non-encrypted ones, and that dropping to 2GB prevents the issue.  But of course, the 2GB limit may itself cause performance problems.

Based on that nature of the issue, I suspect we'll have to wait for Apple to fix it.  Hopefully we will see one more HS supplemental update, and not be forced to jump to Catalina.

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SpikeeFix
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So I just updated to version 11 and it's worse. Ugh. Brand new MacBook is running like trash.

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