VMWare Fusion pro 7.1.1 - Unresponsiveness running yosemite as guest

[Eldaras]

Hi All,

I have a Macbook pro (mid 2014, 16GB ram w/discrete video card) running Yosemite. When I run a yosemite guest, the video is very laggy, and the vm is generally not very responsive.

The guest has 4 cores, 4GB of ram, 256MB of video memory (using discrete card only for 3D applications only) and is running the latest vmware 'hardware' and vmware tools. I have disabled sound and bluetooth.

Is there anything I can do to improve the performance?

Thanks!

[joeboss · Accepted solution]

Yes.  Please see this blog post for the manual workaround, and for a program called "BeamOff" that will provide relief without the manual effort.  https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/improving-yosemite-vm-performance-in-vmware-fusion/

I am not the author and cannot vouch for the pre-compiled version, though.  I downloaded the source, reviewed, and compiled on my own just to be safe.  But it will fix the issue you are seeing.  (You need to run the app in the Guest, if that is not obvious!)

-Joe

[ColoradoMarmot]

You've given too many cores to the guest and are starving the host.  Reduce it to 2 cores.

There is no 3d acceleration available for OSX guests, so that's part of the issue.

[Eldaras]

joeboss‌ Thanks a lot! That improved the performance a lot! For some reason I forgot about this tool... I did try to use it in VirtualBox to see if it improved the performance (but it didn't in my case).

dlhotka‌ I don't think that is the case, as the laptop has 8 vcores (so the host still has 4cores + 12GB to play with).

Just as a curiosity. How long does it take in your cases to start up an OSX vm? In my case it takes roughly 30 seconds and I'm wondering if there's anything else I can do to improve the performance. I'm comparing this in a way to a windows box, running VMWorkstation with a windows guest (which in my experience is very fast), to OSX running on OSX, which is ... slowish.

dlhotka