Issue with disk i/O failure in VMware Fusion

[marcelol]

I will try and do that when I get home tonight ( as time permits, because I was up until 3(!) AM this morning looking at this problem ).

I see where you're going with this, and I will try one thing.....the only thing I've installed since migrating to VMF3 was I updated my anti-virus from

AVG Free 8.5 ( with last updates ) to AVG Free 9, and then applied the newer Bootcamp drivers from Snow Leopard, so I could access things like BT, the camera.

Now as to what Mike was asking.....I did PRECISELY that while the VM was running the "Chkdsk", and it hung. While booting the VM stopped to do

it's thing....

Average 15-30% CPU usage for vmware-vmx, Disk IO was consistent with sequential seeking and reading

Chkdsk went through stages 1 - 3 just fine ( checking indexes, etc )

When it started stage 4, it got to 1% and then stopped

vmware-vmx CPU % went to almost nil......popped up to 3-4%, and then back to 0.2% a couple of times, just before the "Continue, Abort, Retry"

dialog presented itself. If I selected "Continue" it would stay around 3-4% for a few seconds and then drop back down to 0.2%. If I selected "Retry", it

would all of a sudden pop up to 10-15%, and then after a few seconds simply freeze the machine once more and vmware-vmx was practically nil.

The interesting thing about this is that it affected THE ENTIRE SYSTEM. Everything, not just the VM literally Freezes on you. Finder, the Activity Monitor, everything.

I remember these numbers because I started off my career in software development as a QA Engineer, and so I'm rather anal about remembering little statistics like this. I hope this helps.

Windows XP SP 2

VM Memory 1982MB

NVidia 8600M GPU

1 CPU ( Core2Duo 2.5 CPU )

Apple BootCamp Drivers

100GB non-resizable ( pre-allocated ) VMDK

[nbe]

I see where you're going with this, and I will try one thing.....the only thing I've installed since migrating to VMF3 was I updated my anti-virus from AVG Free 8.5 ( with last updates ) to AVG Free 9, and then applied the newer Bootcamp drivers from Snow Leopard, so I could access things like BT, the camera.

I've seen this in another thread where the user used AVG 9 too. He fixed his slowdowns by uninstalling AVG. I'm running AVG 9 as well and up until now haven't seen any problems regarding performance.

Link to the thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1411335#1411335

[marcelol]

Did you have a previous AntiVirus program installed ?

When I get home I'll uninstall AVG9 ( if the VM doesn't crash before I get done uninstalling it. Here's to crossing your fingers ).

Just the same...I would not have expected any of this would bring the VM to a screeching halt ( much less the whole system with it ).

[nbe]

Yes, I upgraded AVG 8.5 to 9. I've set up a new XP SP3 vm to be able to use the new memory improvements in Fusion 3 and used AVG 9 for that (in this case there is no previous AV program). In both vm's I don't notice any performance problems. Actually, antivirus software is quite notorious for bringing down systems and causing a lot of problems regarding stability and performance. Most are resolved by uninstall it and using one of the many other av-products.

Personally I haven't seen any problems regarding performance since I've been using the private beta versions of Fusion 3. The only problem I have right now are the VMware Tools not supporting FreeBSD 8.0 (which is at RC2 right now) yet as the installation script only supports FreeBSD up to 7.2 (it does a version check by using uname -r and comparing that to a list of versionnumbers it knows; just check out the appropriate perl script).

[marcelol]

Immediately I see 3 principal differences between your scenario and mine.

1. XP SP2 vs XP SP3

2. a VMF2 -> VMF3 Migrated VM vs a "Fresh" VMF3 created VM

3. Bootcamp Drivers installed vs ?

The other differences would obviously be what sort of hardware you're running vs my MBP ( Mid 2008 MBP 17" 2.53Ghz Core2Duo 4Gb ).

[nbe]

The only difference would be SP2-SP3. I have several WinXP SP3 vm's, 3 in total. I have 2 that were already created in Fusion 2 which I upgraded to the Fusion 3 beta versions and eventually the final release. The other one I just created 2 days ago in Fusion 3 because I wanted to check out the smaller memory footprint stuff (you can only get that in XP SP3 when you set up a new vm unfortunately). In one of the VM's I did install bootcamp drivers once and I even think I created this vm with Fusion 1.x which I'm not sure. The bootcamp drivers are only necessary for the iSight webcam, without it that won't work so I don't see much reasons to install those (the other vm's don't have the bootcamp drivers because of this). I haven't noticed any performance degradation on all 3 XP SP3 vm's.

I was using it on 2 Macs due to testing Fusion 3. It's an early 2008 15" MBP with 4 GB of ram, the 8600GT 256 MB graphics. It used to have a 320 GB hdd but I replaced it with a OCZ Vertex 250 GB ssd. The other Mac is an early 2009 Mac mini with 4 GB of ram and that same ssd. Both Macs have been running 10.5.8, 10.6, 10.6.1 and 10.6.2 without any problems regarding performance.

Message was edited by: nbe

Added my hardware, cleaned up my reply a bit.

[ColoradoMarmot]

There is a significant performance boost for XP SP3 VM's created in Fusion 3 using Easy Install, due to how the partitions are aligned.