VMware Fusion 2.0.6 is really slow...get your act together VMware

[spreston2]

I purchased both Fusion and Parallels with my MacBook Pro and was so impressed with the speedy Fusion that I didn't even bother to try the Parallels. The press was equally impressed with v1.x of VMware, despite some minor quirks.

After installing the relatively well-done Snow Leopard upgrade, I upgraded what appeared to be a well sorted SIXTH iteration of Fusion (v2.0.6). XP took SIX minutes to boot up properly. I purchased 4GB of memory, reinstalled the software, tools and tried to optimize Fusion, but the product is such a disappointment. So frustrating to wait so long for XP to boot up. This is a terrible product that is not fit for release in current form.

Despite the pain of switching to Parallels, I find it so frustrating to wait for Fusion to boot up that I am sure to abandon this software by Halloween. Based on the postings of other current Fusion users, I am not alone.

Message to the VMware team: Guys - get your act together and have some pride in your work.

Question: any detailed advice to speed up Fusion 2.0.6 before I throw it off a cliff?

[ecytang]

I am also suffering to this problem with Vista x64 in Bootcamp partition. I hope there will be a solution to this asap.

I am a bit concern what will be improved in VMware fusion 3 as well if vmware team has no intention to fix this issue.

[admin]

ME TOOOOOOOOOO

This program is killing me. It is so slow. I think I will get the refund. Running visa ultimate 64 useless very slow.

However I did use some disk frag tools and cc cleaner and disk cleaner this made some difference.

With the other soystem I have downloaded a trial and will use this Virtual on the other

[ColoradoMarmot]

I'm not seeing this - my XP VM's boot in less than a minute, and my largest one (30+ GB), including a number of server-based applications (databases, application servers, etc), boots in less than 2 minutes.

I have all of the host integration stuff turned off - no mirrored folders, no shared apps, etc.

Some thoughts:

Do you have a 7200 RPM drive (makes a HUGE difference)?

I use 2GB files on disk (avoids fragmentation as badly)

I also defrag the guest OS periodically, which also makes a huge difference.

When initially creating a VM, I run bootvis to optimize the boot files - rerun when the boot time gets slow

When I use my largest VM's I shut everything else down, but for most, I can actually run/boot two at the same time and they work ok.

[Pat_Lee]

We highly recommend installing Apple's Performance Update 1.0 that came out this week. This fixed a bug in Apple's disk controller that has resolved the slow down for a number of customers running VMware Fusion 2.0.6.

See the following knowledge base articles for the appropriate download link:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3901

Pat

[spreston2]

Still as slow as molasses. . . . . . . Other posts on this site indicate that this problem continues to be widespread

[Pbryanw]

You do realise this is a forum where people come to discuss their problems, and therefore it will be skewed towards people with problems. That's not to say there aren't any problems - it's that looking at just the forums doesn't tell the whole story.

I haven't had any major problems since upgrading from 1.x to 2.06 and await Fusion 3 - maybe the new release will solve your problems - if you decide to upgrade.

[callagga]

Just noted his thread - so it's not just me having performance issues - has VMWare confirmed/acknowledged this issue? Is there commitment to address it in the next release? (espcially since they are going to charging for the upgrade)

[ColoradoMarmot]

No disagreement. Do you use the host integration stuff (unity, mirrored folders, etc)? If so, try turning it all off, and running in a sandbox (inside the desktop) to see if that improves performance.

[bgertzfield]

Still as slow as molasses. . . . . . . Other posts on this site indicate that this problem continues to be widespread

Just curious, but have you tried installing Apple's Performance Update? I went on-site last Friday with a customer reporting similar slowdowns, and the new Serial ATA driver inside the Performance Update resolved the slowdowns for them.

[bgertzfield]

Still as slow as molasses. . . . . . . Other posts on this site indicate that this problem continues to be widespread

Just curious, but have you tried installing Apple's Performance Update? I went on-site last Friday with a customer reporting similar slowdowns, and the new Serial ATA driver inside the Performance Update resolved the slowdowns for them.

I haven't seen anyone reply to this, so I assume no news is good news..

Can anyone confirm that they encountered slowdowns, then resolved the problem by installing Apple's Performance Update 1.0 (see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3901 )? We'd love to hear people's experiences with this.

[jeromekelly]

I've installed the performance update, and it is still dog slow.

I'm not the only person in my group who is having this issue. I wasn't having the problem prior to the udpate to 2.0.6.

[bgertzfield]

I've installed the performance update, and it is still dog slow.

Thanks for following up. Since this is your first post, can you please describe what is "dog slow"? Is booting, resuming, running CPU-intensive tasks, running disk-intensive tasks, or something else slow?

I'm not the only person in my group who is having this issue. I wasn't having the problem prior to the udpate to 2.0.6.

Can you please describe the hardware and software (Mac OS X version, virtual machine guest operating systems) used by yourself and the other people in your groups?

If you didn't have the problem with 2.0.6, can you try downloading 2.0.5 at:

http://www.vmware.com/downloads/fusion/

to confirm whether that resolves your problem?

Thanks!

[spreston2]

Hi,

The performance update will not install on my computer and a pop up window states that I do not have eligible hardware. I am using MacBook Pro Model # A1226 with most recent update of Snow Leopard. I have windows XP on the client side.

Vmware 2.0.6 is still really slow on start (4+ minutes) before things really settle down and work properly.

I installed 4GB of RAM so once vmware finally gets going, everything is very speedy. The startup is the problem. It takes about 1 minute to the signin screen, which seems reasonable, then about 30 seconds for the windows entry chime and view of the XP desktop. Some programs will launch rather quickly but they get into "not responding" mode and stall for a few minutes until things settle down. Hence 4+ minutes to start up.

Thanks,

S

[ChipMcK]

How many are running the Boot Camp Partition versus a file-based virtual machine?

After I got the stand-alone version of 10.6.1 installed, my file-based VMs ran fine with performance as good as Leopard and 2.0.5.

This past week I have been using my BootCamp Vista 32bit and its performance under Fusion sucks - until the Apple Boot Camp icon appears and then things improve to a degree. I do not know what Apple did with the Boot Camp tools/additions/drivers, but they sure seem to have done in Fusion.

I have read comments like 4+ minutes - did you happen to note the Apple Boot Camp icon?

[spreston2]

Don't use boot camp, just launch fusion from Snow Leopard. Don't see a boot camp icon

[callagga]

Hi,

It seems moving to 4GB of RAM might speed things up from 2GB. Is this always the case? i.e. if my MacBook doesn't seem to be saying it's using the full 2GB of memory whilst I got XP running on VMWare fusion does this imply that going to 4GB of memory would not help?

Here's the detail of my MacBook (haven't check yet whether with this model I can go to 4GB yet)

Model Name: MacBook
Model Identifier: MacBook2,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 4 MB
* Memory: 2 GB*
Bus Speed: 667 MHz

tks

[jeromekelly]

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,3

Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo

Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

Number Of Processors: 1

Total Number Of Cores: 2

L2 Cache: 6 MB

Memory: 4 GB

Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz

Boot ROM Version: MBP53.00AC.B03

SMC Version (system): 1.48f2

Sudden Motion Sensor:

State: Enabled

Hard Drive is 500GB with 7200 RPM

VMWare Fusion 2.0.6

Virtual Machine OS is Windows XP SP 3 with the latest updates.

Normal usage results in me running Outlook, IE, Firefox, Excel, Infuzer, GoToMeeting, MSN Messenger, and Word in Windows. On the Mac I'm typically running Mail, iCal, iTunes, Safari, Firefox, iChat, Skype, Evernote.

For AV - I use Norton (v. 10.1.5.5000) on the Windows Machine and Net Barrier on the Mac.

Net Barrier Versions are:

Intego Menu: 10.5.3

NetBarrier X5 10.5.4

NetUpdate 10.5

Personal Antispam 10.5.3

VirusBarrier X5 10.5.9

My VMWare Virtual Machine Settings are:

40GB disk size split into 2GB files.

1CPU

2GB RAM

NAT

Printers - Match Enable Default

Display - 3D Enabled

Sharing Folders - 3

The behavior I have been seeing since the upgrade is:

HD in Virtual Machine thrashing (blue)

Apple busy indicator - the pointer becomes the color wheel

Boot time and suspend is up to 2x slower than previous

Random periods of sluggishness that makes the machine dog slow

For example, opened the laptop from a suspend yesterday. Logged in and waited for over 5 minutes for Outlook to become responsive so that I could select and open an email.

This did not happen under 2.0.5 in Snow Leopard, and this behavior only started to occur after my upgrade.

[technopimp]

I have installed the Apple "Performance upgrade"...still extremely slow. I have a non-Bootcamp Windows 7 VM that is now taking 10+ minutes to start up when nothing else is running on the machine. I have a mid-2009 MBP, 2.53 C2D with 4GB RAM, 2GB allocated to the VM.

[achansonjr]

Environment:

MacBook Pro 3.06 Ghz Processor

4GB Ram

7200 RPM 500 GB drive

Snow Leopard

Windows 7 on BootCamp configuration

64bit Home Premium

BootCamp Drivers installed from Snow Leopard CD

VM Setup

Points to Boot Camp Partition

1 Virtual Processor

2048 MB allocated RAM

I had been using 2.0.2 Fusion with Windows 7 (64 Bit) installed on a Boot Camp partition set up to run as a Windows 2008 x64 volume. The performance was painfully slow so I figured an upgrade to 2.0.6 would help.

So far the performance is not better on startup, or at least what I would expect. I have used other virtualization solutions, albiet not necessarily on this machine, and in the past XP has always been fairly snappy (VirtualBox, and VMWare Server). The performance in Windows 7 is not what I would have expected. To boot up or perform any actions within the VM it takes a significant amount of time to get from initial startup to actual usability. ~3 minutes.

I have installed the Performance Update 1.0 from Apple for Snow Leopard.

Windows will randomly reboot within VMWare Fusion after around ~5 minutes. Additionally I get some really weird graphics issues while VMWare looks like it is trying to identify the optimum resolution, it will resize several times and eventually give me the log in screen.

Is VMWare Fusion 3 going to offer any benefits? What am I missing here in the configuration? Should I allocate more virtual cores? I have tried it with two cores and there was no improvement.

My Boot Camp install works beautifully and loads up promptly when going directly into Windows 7.

Thanks,

Clint