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crsandoval
Contributor
Contributor

VM Ware Fusion / Big Sur - Slow on 2019 MacBook Air

Hello:

Apologies if I have missed any steps here, this is my first post. I’ve been running VM Ware 11, but upgraded to 12 when the beta release came out prior and running Big Sur. It seems that since the upgrade Windows 10 has been incredibly slow. Chrome/Edge and IE are slow and Win 10 is slow with most tasks. The primary reason for using Win 10 is that my company requires IE/Win 10 and runs compatibility checks so using my Mac isn’t an option. The company is migrating the web apps to Edge very soon, but the slowness is still there. My MBA allows to have 2 cores and 5gb of RAM for the virtual environment. No other apps besides IE/Edge/Chrome are being used.

Any suggestions/settings you can recommend to help are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

What is the CPU and memory spec of your Mac?

Are you still using the beta release of Fusion or a fully released version?

 


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crsandoval
Contributor
Contributor

Hello:  

The CPU is a MacBook Air 1.6 Dual Core Intel Core i5 w/ 8GB RAM. The version of Fusion is 12.1.12 Commercial Use license.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

That machine is marginal for running big sur or windows 10 by themselves, let alone one as a VM.  Each one really needs 2 cores to function well.

 

Your best bet is to give the VM only 1 core and 4 GB of ram, and shut down everything else on the host.  You can try 2 cores for the guest, but you're likely to run into contention problems, especially if you do anything with any sort of load.  In either case,  I doubt that'll give you a decent experience.  It's probably time to upgrade the machine.

If you do, note that the M1 machines will not run intel guests (nor are they likely to in future).

The only other option is to run Windows 10 in boot camp mode (not virtualized) so that it's the only OS running at all.

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crsandoval
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for the tip. It is a 2019 MBP. I’ll implement those changes and see if anything improves. Right now since the Mac has four cores, I have the VM running two cores and MacOS has the other two. Current RAM allocation is 5GB for VM and the remaining 3GB with MacOS.

I wish that M1 Macs were supported because I would buy one today.

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dempson
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

You seem to be giving conflicting descriptions of your Mac.

A 2019 Mac notebook with 1.6 GHz Core i5 must be a MacBook Air, which only has two cores. With hyperthreading this extends to four virtual cores, but those should not be counted when deciding how many cores to allocate to a VM and how many are left for the host, because virtual cores only count as a small fraction of a real core. If you have this Mac model then the advice from @ColoradoMarmot stands, and the Mac is not well suited to running a VM as there aren't enough real cores available (as well as being limited on sustained performance and memory capacity).

If you have a MacBook Pro with four real cores then it cannot be 1.6 GHz as there is no MacBook Pro of that clock speed.

 

Assuming you actually have a MacBook Air, if you want to replace your Mac with one which is better suited to running VMs, Apple is still selling these Intel notebook models:

  • MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports)
  • MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)

Both have at least four CPU cores and 16 GB memory.

If you consider refurbished or second hand, then somewhat older 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Pros are also an option, but many have caveats: butterfly keyboards in 2016-2019 models, max supported macOS version decreases the further you go back, with the limit already known for pre-2015 models.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Virtual cores don't count, so if it's an i5 Dual-core, that's only two, not four.

 

MacOS needs at least 4GB to run well.

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crsandoval
Contributor
Contributor

Sorry about that, it is a MacBook Air, not a Pro. I’m wondering if I should just deal with it for the moment and wait until VM supports M1.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Fusion will never support intel guests on M1 processors.  The current plans are to support Linux and other licensable ARM based operating systems.  Windows 10 ARM is not legally licensable on a M1 Mac, so that's not on the roadmap.

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crsandoval
Contributor
Contributor

Bummer. So looks like I need to get an Intel Mac. Was hoping to take advantage of the additional cores/speed/performance with M1.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Yeah, there is some slim hope that Microsoft will change the license and allow use of WIndows ARM on mac as a virtual machine - it has emulation inside it that's not bad for most apps.  But until that does, there's no way to legally run windows on a M1 mac.

 

I was hoping they'd announce it today as part of Windows 11, but haven't found any references to it.

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