100% Disk Activity & Incredibly Slow - Fusion 6.0.2 + Windows 8.1 x64 Pro

[Siyfion]

I have my virtual machine running on a USB 3.0 device connected to my 15" MacBook Pro Retina, the USB drive seems reasonably quick in benchmarks, yet the virtual machine itself is horrifically slow to use. If I load up Task Manager I can see that the disk usage is stuck at 100% with transfer rates of between 1.0MB/s -> 8.0MB/s, with average response times of 8000ms+. Obviously something is seriously wrong with this setup, however before I go out and spend a few hundred pounds on an external SSD drive, I just wanted to make sure that it really was the cause!

[Siyfion]

Great. A brand new G-RAID mini disk, with the following benchmark and it's STILL horrifically slow. I've also got the latest update to Fusion that came out since my last post. Any suggestions? Otherwise I'm going to be asking for a full refund soon, it's unusable.

[ColoradoMarmot]

How much ram and how many cores do you have allocated to the guest?

[Siyfion]

2GB of RAM and 2 Cores. As I said in my original post, it seems to be only the HDD activity that's maxing out. The RAM usage sits at around 1GB and the processor load never really does all that much, maybe 10-30% on average? I also had the disk thin provisioned to begin with, and now it's all allocated, but still no difference in speed.

The Mac in question is a brand new 15" MacBook Pro Retina model and the new HDD drive is a G-Raid mini.

[amurrey]

I've not had much luck with running VM's under Fusion from external USB 3.0 drives.  I wonder if moving to a thunderbolt port would be faster?

[Siyfion]

While I'd love to try this, having just spent close to £200 on an external RAID USB 3.0 drive, I'm sure as hell not going to be buying anything else! :smileycry:

[Siyfion]

It is ridiculous that nobody from VMware has even bothered to make an official response to this query, surely this is an easy enough problem to replicate under lab conditions?! Currently I am responsible for our entire virtualised server infrastructure at my company and quite frankly, if this is the level of quality in software and support that VMware are providing, I'll be looking at alternatives shortly.

[Linjo]

Just a note, this is not an official support-forum and is not monitored by VMware Support or Product Managers, this is a community based forum where people help people.

To get "official" support here is your options: Fusion Support, Training & Technical Documentation | United States

[Siyfion]

Fair point, I didn't realise that support wasn't offered via these forums. However I have raised a support ticket with a link to this forum post, so I guess we'll see. Also, I can confirm that this is definitely a vmware issue, as Parallels works perfectly with the G-RAID drive. If they can't resolve the issue, I'll be asking for a full refund and simply switching over to Parallels instead.

[Rob_Convery]

Did you ever get this resolved as I am also seeing it.

[lensv]

I'd like to know this too. I'm having similar issues :smileymischief: