VMware Communities
bxlewi1
Contributor
Contributor

VMWare 8.0.1 is terrible

VMWare used to be pretty awesome. It was fast and just felt like it was a better application than Parallels Desktop. Then came Yosemite and El Capitan. Under both of these OSX versions, my late 2013 retina MacBookPro is practically unusable when trying to run a VM for any kind of productive work. For me, that's Visual Studio 2015. Graphically it's terrible. It's slow, animations stutter and God help you if you try to resize a Chrome window.

The response I got from a random VMWare twitter account was "have you mentioned this in the forums" and "we've never run into any of those issues". I find that hard to believe, unless your test surface includes a Mac Pro and, well we're done with testing.

I even naively updated to 8.1 pro in the hope that perhaps something had been done graphically - as it was a bullet point (being faster graphics). Meh, still terrible.

I have two choices, run in boot camp or buy parallels - which I don't really want to do.

I can furnish any additional details you might require outside of what I already have.

i7 @2.3GHz

16GB RAM

512GB super fast SSD

Various toggles and switches and VM configs do nothing appreciable other than deflate my will to continue to use this product.

Thank you for whatever you can help with.

Brian Lewis

Message was edited by: Michael Roy to reflect the actual version being described

14 Replies
wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hello Brian,

Please attach a vmware.log file found in your VM bundle to a reply here so that we can see what your current config is.

Also note that your Fusion 8 purchase comes with free support, so you can open tickets here https://my.vmware.com/group/vmware/get-help

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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bxlewi1
Contributor
Contributor

This was from a fresh install of Fusion and a fresh Windows 10 Pro VM with all the defaults as given by the installation wizard.

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kungfuu72
Contributor
Contributor

I am completely with you on this one.

Even when Yosemite came out with VMF7 the graphics were horribly and noticeably slow after using VMF6 for quite some time.

The Windows Experience Index indicates this as well on a thread that I've followed for quite some time, but never got a resolution to it:

Fusion 7 graphics performance - Windows Experience Index drops

I thought that the issue would have at least improved in VMF8 but it actually got worse... Chrome windows are so choppy... how did this even pass the surface testing phase in your SDLC?! How can "worse" graphics performance equate to "advanced" graphics performance according to your pointed marketing?

Run Windows on a Mac: VMware FUsion Features | United States

At this point, Parallels is at least worth a try if VMF keeps getting slower with each major release.

What gets me is that the minor releases don't even fix these things...

wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hello Brian,

Yes the settings that your VM has should be just fine on your hardware.

There are a few suggestions I might have, but they would take away features and I'd rather you stick with the defaults.

The one thing that I notice at the moment is that the log file suggests that you do not have a good working VMware Tools install.

The log mentions that you installed it, but after the install there are still complaints about it not running.

Can you try to uninstall VMware Tools, then reboot and install VMware Tools (and reboot the guest OS again)

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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JeffersonR
Contributor
Contributor

(Also posted in other thread: Mouse movement very slow in Fusion 8.1)

I upgraded to El Capitan (OSX 10.11) and then upgraded to VMware Fusion 8.01 (from Fusion 6.x) and now my Windows 8.01 VM instance is terribly slow.

Mouse tracking lags by several moments.  Window screens open and close with lots of lag.

The longer I run Windows the slower it gets.  I am rebooting Fusion and the Windows instance several times a day.  Driving me crazy!

I "repaired" my VMware Tools install just today after reading this thread.  Running v 10.0.0 build 2977863.  We'll see if this makes any difference.

Should I call into support?

At the moment I am planning to roll back to VMware 6 soon...

JeffR

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ChipMcK
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Fusion 8.1 ??????


I can locate only 8.0.1 !!

Are you running a beta version ???

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JeffersonR
Contributor
Contributor

My error.  Fusion 8.01.

UPDATE:

I increased my allocated RAM from 2Mb (the recommended) to 4mb for the VM (I have 8MB total on my MacBook Pro.)

And I increased the number of COU cores from 2 to 4 cores for the VM (I have a total of 8 cores [4 physical + 4 virtual/hyperthreaded] on my MBP Intel i7).

The speed and responsiveness has improved greatly on the VM. Slower and less MB on the Mac side though.  Smiley Sad

Fusion 8.01 with 4Mb/4 cores is still slower than Fusion 6 with 2Mb and 2 cores - but at least it is usable now.

I can't recommend that anyone upgrade to Fusion 8 at this time.  Stick with Fusion 6 or look elsewhere.

JeffR

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mangydog
Contributor
Contributor

Just installed 8.0.2 and it looks very promising so far. Performance is much better.

Make sure VMware tools are updated after upgrading.

MB Pro Late 2013

i7 2.6GHz

16GB RAM

512GB SSD

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Hyperthreaded cores don't count - you could be starving the host.

There's something definitely odd about your environment - Fusion 8 is faster on both of my machines than Fusion 7.

How were these VM's originally created?

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wila
Immortal
Immortal

Hi,

When you say - I "repaired" my VMware Tools - it is not clear to me what you mean.

Using the repair option in the installer does not work 9 out of 10 times, not sure why, but that's just how it always has been.

The only proper repair is -uninstall - reboot VM -install VMware Tools -reboot VM.

Maybe that's what you meant, but my crystal ball wasn't working on this one.

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
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JeffersonR
Contributor
Contributor

RE: dlhotka - "Hyperthreaded cores don't count"

- My "Virtual Machine | Settings" Shows 8 cores on my MacBook Pro.  I changed from 2 to 4 and things are running much better.  If Hyperthreaded cores doe\n't count then I would have all 4 physical cores assigned to the VM and 0 to the Mac ... but The Mac side is running fine.  So it *appears* that HT cores do count in this instance.

RE: Wila - When you say - I "repaired" my VMware Tools - it is not clear to me what you mean.

- I chose "Virtual Machine | Reinstall VMware Tools" from the VMware Fusion.

FINAL UPDATE:

I am running with Fusion 8.02 now.

I increased my allocated RAM from 2Mb (the recommended) to 4mb for the VM (I have 8MB total on my MacBook Pro.)

And I increased the number of CPU cores from 2 to 4 cores for the VM (I have a total of 8 cores [4 physical + 4 virtual/hyperthreaded] on my MBP Intel i7).

The speed and responsiveness has improved greatly on the VM.

I have no more performance complaints now.  Working as expected.

Thanks for the help.

JR

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Solidbrass
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I think the original post is dead on.  Fusion Pro 8 has made all of us beta testers.

It boggles the mind that 8.0 was released without even being able to finish a 10.11 install, a critical bug by any stretch of the imagination.

That the VMWare Tools installer has been broken for OS X clients for three straight releases of 8 due to a trivial scripting error underlines the lack of unit testing during the period before release, and implies that there is almost no quality control enforcement prior to releasing to production.  Either that or there are a lot of more critical bugs that are being patched, so these bugs that are driving users nuts are considered acceptable losses.

8 full releases in, Fusion still cannot recover free space from an OS X client virtual disk, so they invariably grow to fill the virtual disk.  You can either manage VM size by building a new VM and moving applications and settings over each time there is a new full point release of OS X, or upgrade the OS within the VM and accept that the VM's will become huge in a way that Windows VM's do not.

Fusion increasingly feels like it gets hand me down code changes from Workstation as long as the code is doing back end stuff that is portable to the OS X environment.  It then seems to get very little exercise before it is pushed to production and released. Basic functionality like publishing a VM to an ESXi host is flaky at best in Fusion Pro, but it is completely broken in both 7 and 8 if you want to push an OS X VM to an ESXi host (running on say a Mini or Mac Pro), since they won't be able to find their boot drive image afterwards, and then they still don't normally work if you try to manually point it at the image on disk.  This forces the user to tediously create install images that can be uploaded to an ESXi host, and then try to figure out a hack-around that will trick ESXi into allowing the installation of say 10.11 on "incompatible" virtual hardware version 11 (for ESXi 6).  Since they work - but become gigantic - if you upgrade an existing 10.10 VM on an ESXi host, the problem is clearly that Fusion buyers, and I guess anyone who needs to use OS X in a virtualization environment, is being treated like a red headed step child.

Performance of OS X client VM's is bad.  If I install Mac OS X 10.11 on a 2012 vintage MacBook Air with 4GB of RAM, it runs just fine.  If I allocate 4GB of RAM and two cores to a 10.11 VM on my 2013 Mac Pro, I can type faster than letters are being rendered out of the keyboard buffer.  This bad UI performance is noticeable at most resolutions, but basically intolerable at higher resolutions, say 2560x1440.  If you bump it up to four cores, it can keep up a bit better, but that's ridiculous.  I shouldn't have to kludge things and use something like BeamOff to get acceptable UI performance for two full point releases of both Fusion and OS X.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

For CPU intensive applications, they don't.  You may run into instability or unexpected performance problems in the future.  The recommend has long been N-1 physical cores is the maximum to allocate to any individual VM.

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dataf1sh123
Contributor
Contributor

Hey mate,

I have the same Macbook Pro with Win 10 and have experienced ALL the issues you're describing.

Some things that word for me:

mainMem.backing = "swap"

scsi0:0.virtualSSD = 1

MemTrimRate = "0"

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"


also this page helps: Guest OS's get unusably slow after a few hours / after restoring a snapshot