Fusion 11.5.1 will show 'Not Responding' on my iMac Activity Monitor at times.

[Curtterp]

At times, I will see that vmware goes to 'Not Responding' on my iMac Activity Monitor. It happened a few times earlier in the week, and one time it went for 30 minutes before I finally tried to Force Quit vmware (which didn't work) and I had to shut down my iMac. Out of 7 guests running at the time, 3 of them did not recover, and I had to revert back to an earlier snapshot to bring them back to life.

Host Hardware

2019 iMac - Up to date Catalina macOS

i9 8 core processor

48 gigs of RAM

3 TB Fusion Drive

I can perform the same operations on my Macbook Pro 16" which has a little more ram and hard drive.

I do notice that on my Macbook Pro, each guest instance is by themselves in Activity Monitor, but on my iMac, there is only an instance of vmware, no instances show up by themselves.

So why am I having this Not Responding issue, and why does my Macbook Pro show guest instances, but my iMac is not?

Is there anything I can do, a setting that I can change?

Thanks in advance for any help/direction/explanation that anyone can give/shed light on

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

The VMware Fusion process is just the GUI, if that one is "Not Responding" then force quitting it is fine as it would not quit any VMs.

I do notice that on my Macbook Pro, each guest instance is by themselves in Activity Monitor, but on my iMac, there is only an instance of vmware, no instances show up by themselves.

This must be due to a configuration in Activity Monitor. You probably have it set to "my processes" and not "All Processes".
eg.

If you have it set to "All Processes" then it should indeed show a vmware-vmx process for each VM running.

Figuring out which VM is wich vmware-vmx process is another matter.

This script might help:

 cat vmware-show-pid.sh 
#!/bin/bash
ps x -o "pid command" | awk '{ match($0,"D 4");print $1 substr($0,RSTART+3,length($0)) }' | grep [v]mx

--

Wil

[Curtterp]

Thank you, Wil for the reply

Indeed my iMac did have only my processes checked. Checking all processes did the trick to see all my instances of vmware up and running.

Thanks for the small script. I will remember that if I need it in the future.

I will have to keep looking into my iMac to see if there is a problem with anything on the host. I have to see if the newest macOS update this week might have helped with possible issues with vmware hanging up and not responding.

Thanks again

[wila]

Hi,

You're welcome.

It wasn't really an answer to the original question of why you had a non responding process.

Hopefully next time it happens (better if it won't) my answer would hopefully give you more pointers on how-to identify what is the problem.

You mentioned in your opening post that the iMac has a Fusion drive and that might have been a trigger for this type of issue.

See also: Fixed super slow resume in Fusion 11.0.0 / Win7 and the links from that thread.

There's more info on it in this forum, but as "Fusion Drive" sounds a lot like "VMware Fusion" it might be hard to locate.

edit: I knew what to look for, so found the post I was looking for.

Please see the reply from dlhotka​ in this post:

Re: slow VM restore of saved state

Normally I am a big proponent for using split files on a virtual disk as it has a number of advantages when using snapshots.

With a Fusion drive however that advice is eventually working against you as you can read down there.

Not saying this was the reason of your problem, but there are chances that it was related.

--

Wil