Uselessly slow after Big Sur upgrade, no actual VMWare support options?

[tllado]

I upgraded my 2020 i7 Macbook Pro to Big Sur a few months ago and now VMWare Fusion 11 12 is uselessly slow. I'm talking 5-15 seconds delay per mouse click in simple, low-intensity programs like web browsers and office productivity apps. For intense programs like Solidworks (the main reason why I purchased VMWare Fusion), I'm not even trying anymore. I ran previous versions of Fusion on this and previous Macbooks in previous MacOS releases and they weren't lighting fast but they were usable. I tried running Fusion 12 with all hardware acceleration options enabled, and it was actually even slower than it was with hardware acceleration disabled. Searching through the VMWare website (which is competing with xfinity.com for the worst-designed website I've ever used) it appears that they don't offer any tech support for non-corporate customers. Is that correct? When I go to VMWare's support page, they list that my purchases have no associated support options. Which means I'm now in the market for a better virtualization solution. Can anyone recommend a way to get VMWare Fusion 12 running at usable speed in Big Sur? Or can anyone recommend a better VM?

[Technogeezer]

Have you tried Fusion 12?  Fusion 11 is not supported on Big Sur. 

[tllado]

Right, I'm running 12.1.0.

[ColoradoMarmot]

So a few questions:

- Did you upgrade the virtual hardware and vmware tools on the guest?

- What's the actual host and guest CPU and RAM configuration

- Where is the VM itself - internal drive, external drive?

- What else is running on the host and in the guest?  In particular is any sort of antivirus running scans?

[wila]

Hi,

Yeah their website(s) are pretty bad.. very corporate mindset and if you don't know where to find it then you need at least an external search engine to find thing.

re. No support options:
AFAIK you can only buy support at the time you buy the upgrade (or new license), see:
https://store-us.vmware.com/vmware-fusion-12-pro-5424173700.html

You can switch the support level (complimentary, basic & production) and then the time you need support.
This is new since Fusion 12. Before that, it was more difficult to buy support.

As you can see on this page: https://www.vmware.com/support/support-resources/questions.html buying support for Fusion is via the shop. You can try the chat or call one of the phone numbers.

It is also possible for the community here to help you out.

Your experience is not expected, it should run quite well. So something is out of the ordinary.
Like dlhotka says "we need more info"...
Please attach a vmware.log file from your virtual machine bundle to a reply here so that we have some starting grounds to see how your VM is configured and perhaps even already see the reason in the VM why it is performing badly. It also doesn't hurt to answer the questions from dlhotka.

--
Wil

[SvenGus]

BTW and hopefully, future Fusion development won’t be focused only on M1, but also on Intel Macs, at least for the following years, during the transition; for example, Windows 10 is almost unusable with nested virtualization enabled (which is also unusably slow): a serious bug (or rather a missing feature: no VMware hypervisor support on Big Sur; while Apple’s clearly doesn’t work as it should…), which should be addressed as soon as possible…!

[ColoradoMarmot]

On the VMWare hypervisor, I'm pretty confident that nothing will change.  Future OS's won't allow it at all, and VMWare has other places they're focusing development.

[SvenGus]

In the meantime, they deliver a partly non-functional product, as nested virtualization doesn’t work as it should in Big Sur: not good at all! So, at the very least, they should work with Apple and its hypervisor to fix this, if they won’t port the VMware hypervisor to Big Sur…

[Technogeezer]

Otherwise users to move to Parallels if they don't have the hardware that supports the instructions that make nested virtualization work better today for Fusion..

[mlippold1]

I have the hardware that makes it "work better" and it still is completely un-usable.    Catalina - works perfectly.    Big Sur - runs literally 100 times slower.  

I'm just going to ride out this Mac hardware on Catalina until it just doesn't run well anymore and then I guess go back to Windows with Hyper-V.

[RochComeau]

I had the same hair pulling issues with SolidWorks. Downgraded the VM to 12 and it started working normally again.

[RochComeau]

Just another quick update...

Upgraded to 12.1.2 and VM machine to 18 and it all seems to be working normally.

[RuneEklund]

Did you grant full access to disk in system settings in MacOS?

[anders123]

I have tried to download teams from microsoft home page - simply does not work via VM-ware

It works of cause fine via a "normal PC"

I tried to execute it on Windows 10 on VMWARE --> I MUST GIVE UP !!!!!!!

It is so extreme slow - I have given the vm-ware windows 20.000 GB it just hangs

It cannot show the browser page above and it can definitely not run TEAMS

[ColoradoMarmot]

What's the host hardware and guest configuration?

[anders123]

Hardware Overview:

  Model Name: MacBook Pro

  Model Identifier: MacBookPro15,1

  Processor Name: 6-Core Intel Core i9

  Processor Speed: 2,9 GHz

  Number of Processors: 1

  Total Number of Cores: 6

  L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

  L3 Cache: 12 MB

  Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

  Memory: 32 GB

  System Firmware Version: 1554.140.20.0.0 (iBridge: 18.16.14759.0.1,0)

[ColoradoMarmot]

And the guest configuration?

That's the same machine I have, and I can run 4+ VM's at once without a problem, so something is definitely wrong.

[JSambrook]

I experienced this problem recently.

What I found was that reinstalling the VMware Tools helped. When it went to do that, it upgraded the KEXTs from VMware as well. So it was a couple of iterations of 1) make some update, 2) reboot the image in VMware, 3) if not done with upgrades, go back to step 1.

I am running VMware 12.1.2 right now, and Big Sur 11.6.1.

When re-installing the VMware tools, it mumbled something about updating the pre-boot volume. Before doing this update, restarting Big Sur would result in the boot process failing once then recovering. After this update, that problem appears to be resolved as well.