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TimoHalofan
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VM's are very slow to boot - Workstation 15 Pro

So after using 12 Pro for a couple of years, I decided to switch to 15 Pro. Granted according to the program itself said my Intel Xeon E5530s are no longer supported so I just put the monitor.allowLegacyCPU = "true“ line into the VMware config file as many tutorials/forum posts say. This worked for about half a month just fine when things took a turn for the worse.

All of a sudden my VMs would get stuck on the VMware version of the POST screen or shortly after it and would be stuck there for 30 minutes to 1 hour or more (didn't really time it but it would at least take a very long time for them to load in) before actually getting into the guest OS. As far as I have seen the guest then works as expected. I'm not sure what triggered this behavior but I tired:
Normal reinstalls, clean reinstalls (using IObit Uninstaller), moving the program to a different installation location, and after doing the clean install making a fresh new VM.

After all of these, the issue is still there.

Both Workstation 12 Pro and Hyper-V can run just fine but 15 does not. According to HP Array Configuration Utility the drive(s) itself is fine however seeing how I use 2 different drives for my VMs it would be unlikely that they'd both be causing issues at the same time from the same moment. And when running the VMs the drives also do not seem to get much utilization while stuck on that POST screen.

I'm using an HP ProLiant ML350 G6 with: 2x Intel Xeon E5530, 48GB ram and a  Quadro FX 3700.

VMware itself doesn't show any errors and I couldn't find any in the application section of Event Viewer. Tried looking through the logs that VMware produced but I had no clue what to look for so decided to leave it as is. Any suggestions/ideas are highly welcome.

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TimoHalofan
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I still have no idea what actually causes the issue but seeing how they dropped support for these types of sockets/CPUs I doubt anyone will get any actual answers. For anyone seeing this in the future if you really need to emulate on your current system that uses an older CPU you're probably better off using VirtualBox or buying a newer system and running a newer version of VMWare on that.

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TimoHalofan
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I still have no idea what actually causes the issue but seeing how they dropped support for these types of sockets/CPUs I doubt anyone will get any actual answers. For anyone seeing this in the future if you really need to emulate on your current system that uses an older CPU you're probably better off using VirtualBox or buying a newer system and running a newer version of VMWare on that.

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chatravin
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I faced exactly the same situation. I have a Sony vaio laptop with 1st gen Core i7 740Q  which now has an ssd hard disk. I don't know what to do as I have already done whatever I could  do to make things better. Sure there will be some vmware guy here kind enough to investigate some time and find and present the solution here. I'm really looking forward for it.

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cslewis
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Are you by any chance running docker desktop or wsl2?

I had a similar experience where certain guest OSes would boot very slowly if Docker desktop was enabled. This requires that hyper-v is running in the background to support wsl2.

Running coreinfo64 revealed that HYPERVISOR      *       Hypervisor is present

When I disabled wsl2 and rebooted, my guest OSes booted as fast as they used to.

I guess whatever VMWare did to support player / workstation working with wsl2 enabled has a limitation for non-linux gues OSes.

I hope this helps.

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chatravin
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cslewis,  thanks for your reply, but I decided to change my laptop which has newer cpu and I think that cleared the problem. again thanks for your help.

 

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