Performance degradation over extended Idiol peroids with Mac-OS suspend (Shut and open lid). Windows 10 Fall creators update (1709) / Fusion 10.0.1

[Revcorrupt]

In addition to the other problems already noted with VMware Fusion 10 and Windows Fall Creators update (1709)... I have also been seeing performance degradation over time while letting my MacBook Pro set over-night with the Windows 10VM active, or while suspending and resuming the MacBook Pro. Pass power status to VM is turned Off. Accelerated 3D Graphics is turned on, 1024MB memory allocated.  Use of full resolution is off. Enabled Shared Folders is turned on, but not fictional for Microsoft Office due to known bug.

The symptoms are slow performance within windows.

- Extended time to close windows

- Slowness moving between running programs

- Difficulty or slowness in opening new programs

- Difficulty pulling up the Windows-button menu

- Delays in ctrl-alt-delete screen appearing when command sent from VMware.

In one case when the Macbook was suspended and resumed multiple times in a given night (shut and re-open lid); The Windows 10 VM hung completely and I had to force a shutdown and restart the VM. The only additional applications in use during this time was Mac Firefox and Mac Chrome. An additional Linux Enterprise-SUSE VM has been running in the background and appears unaffected by any of these problems.

I am working to replicate the issues and pull statistics from the MacBook and from within the VM using perfmon in an attempt to isolate the issue. I wanted to open a forum post as I feel there may be a large amount of people this may impact, and these people may already have statistics to post here.

MacBook Pro Retina Mid 2014, 16GB Memory, Version 10.12.6

VMware Fusion 10.0.1 (6754183)
Windows 10 Enterprise; Fall Creators update (1709), Version 10.0.16299
VMware Virtual Machine Hardware Version: 14

Antivirus: None; Recently uninstalled Trend-Micro per separate support request on Microsoft Office.

Applications Open during affected time: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Lync, Microsoft OneDrive.

Additional VM in use (Unaffected): Linux Enterprise SUSE.

Additional programs in-use on Mac (Unaffected): Firefox, Chrome

Thanks.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Make sure that you haven't allocated more than N-1 vCPU's to the guest, where N is the number of physical cores in the host.  That's either 2 or 4 depending on the MBP model you have.

[Revcorrupt]

Thanks. I have 3 of 8 cores assigned in windows, and in my almost completely idol Linux VM, there are only 2 of 8 cores.

[palter]

A MacBook Pro only has 4 physical cores, not 8.  It looks like you have 8 cores because of hyperthreading.

You should reduce the number of cores assigned to your VMs as you're starving the host.

[Revcorrupt]

I will take that into consideration, however I have to note:
Before updating to Windows 10 Fall Creators update in combination with an from Fusion 8 to Fusion 10, this problem has never occurred. I have ran this configuration for almost a year without any issues.

If it is VMware's recommendation to only use half of the hyper-threaded cores, I can perform that change; however they should disable the threading or provie a warning if this is the case to stop people from making that mistake.

Also, during the time of the problem the CPU utilization was not severely impacted. My system only showed about 40% CPU utilization across all cores combined.
I feel that this is still a concern.

After having it happen 3 times, now I am having difficulty replicating the issue. I have monitoring and logging enabled and all appears to be functioning normally at the moment. I will post an update and will likely open a support case once I have more data.

Thanks.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Any given virtual machine should have no more than N-1 cores assigned (N=physical cores).  You can have multiple VM's running with a total great than N, but no single VM.  It has to do with how the guest OS locks the cores, which can be an intermittent problem and change based on the guest OS and what's running in it - sometimes it's fine, and sometimes it's dog slow.

When running multiple VM's RAM can be a huge issue - even though 'memory pressure' looks ok, if the VM's are swapping you'll see degradation.  Rule of thumb is to have the total RAM allocated to the virtual machines < installed ram -4GB.  The 4GB varies up and down based on the OSX version and what's running on the host, but it's a pretty good benchmark.

Other things that can cause this are having frequent antivirus scans or restore points scheduled - they kick off as soon as the VM resumes and can give the appearance of a hangup.

[Revcorrupt]

*** Update:

I was able to duplicate the issues today. It appears that it is correlated to Microsoft Office 2016 (with latest patches). When MS Word, MS Outlook, and Visio are running for extended periods, when MacOS sleep-resume cycles occur the Office applications in the VM will go into a dormant  mode of some sort? (not sure on this)

When you click on them in windows 10, CPU on the VM will spike for extended periods of time and memory will grow slightly. If you are very patient, you can eventually close the Office applications one-at-a-time, clearing up the VM and CPU will return to normal.

As described previously, the CPU and Memory on the MacOS where not drastically affected. CPU was at less than 25%, Memory was holding at about 75% consumed. The other Linux VM attached was not affected at all.

Currently I have no proof that VMware is the cause of this problem. It appears to be a Office issue. However considering the write issues with Office to the shared drives, I will be adding notes to my open VMware case and noting these problems as well.

Thank you everyone for you advice.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Ahh, are you letting the machine sleep without first sleeping the VM?  Best practice is to sleep the VM manually first - might be worth a try.