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Cengiz123
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Very slow resume after upgrading to High Sierra and VMWare 10

Resuming a CentOS 7 guest went up from seconds to minutes. I have an APFS SSD. Is there a known issue?

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Mohannad
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I can also confirm that moving the VM to an HFS+ disk image goes back to normal loading time. Looking forward to a fix for this issue.

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Mohannad
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Wanted to confirm that testing Fusion 10.1.0 Update - the issue is still present. Was hoping for a fix. Ah well...

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KarlCep
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The provided workaround seems to have fixed it for me. Details:

High Sierra 10.13.2

VMWare Fusion 10.1.0

APFS, WITH FileVault

VM is a Windows 7 image

Prior to upgrading to High Sierra/APFS, the VM would restore in seconds. (I was also using VMWare Fusion 8.5 at the time.) After the upgrade of the OS/filesystem, it would take minutes to restore the VM, and as others indicated, I found it faster to just shutdown and restart the client OS instead. I reported the problem to support, who refused to believe there was a problem since "no one else has reported it"! (There's always someone that is first!) I upgraded to Fusion 10, and the problem persisted.

After using the provided "fix" (really a workaround) to change the large disk setting in the VM firmware, my restores are now back to a few seconds!!!!

NOTE: I DO have FileVault turned on on my drive, so this seems to indicate that FileVault may not be a factor. (I suspect it is more related to the new APFS with High Sierra than anything, but no proof.)

I'll keep using the sleep/restore cycle and report back if my times get bad again.

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KarlCep
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Unfortunately, my restore times are now back to minutes instead of seconds.  😞

Please fix this!!! It is very annoying when you can shutdown/restart faster than sleep/restore.

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Tim360
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I also have noticed significant increase in resume time for my W10x64 VM's under Fusion 8.5.10 on OSX 10.13.2  with AFPS. Mid 2015 MBP 17"/16G/512SSD/Filevault enabled.

I haven't attempted the workaround yet, though will give it a try....

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gkslender
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I've also got this problem and is very annoying. Hopefully VMWare will release an update to fix this or provide some guidance on a workaround that will work.

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gr2020
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FYI, the workaround that seems to be working for everyone is to save your VM files in a HFS+ non-encrypted disk image. See post #16 and later, above in this thread.

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gkslender
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Mmmm, tried that and it really isn't that much better... still fairly slow and not like it was when I initially built the guest VM. It is like the VM image is fragmented badly and that I/O related to restoring the VM state is being heavily penalised (differently to initially saving the state only 15 minutes earlier). Something isn't right and would be great if someone from VMWare would confirm that they are aware and looking at the problem. Makes we wonder if Parallels would have this same problem !??

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jmacvean
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Same issue here.  7-10 minutes to resume a VM that is on a APFS/encrypted drive.

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jmacvean
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@gkslender Parallels does not seem to have this issue.

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JanInSoCal
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I am running High Sierra (10.13.3) and VMware Fusion 10.1.1, running a Windows 7 VM, and have the same issue with slow resume. I would like to try the workaround with the BIOS settings, but I don't have the "Power on to Firmware" menu option. Please see my two screen shots. What am I missing??

Thanks to anyone who can point me to the light...

Jan

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Cengiz123
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BIOS settings do not do the job. Best is to create a second partition and format it using the HFS format. You can create this using Disk Utility w/o loosing data or need for a format.

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lcarson
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It would be great if VMWare would issue a fix for this problem. It's ridiculous how long it has been outstanding with no fix being announced.

The solution to split your partition and create an HPFS formatted one seems like a bit of a kludge because it limits your ability to grow the size of your virtual disk - unless you enjoy playing partition resizing games.

It's also not clear to me how that split affects Filevault2 encryption. As it stands having the single APFS partition encrypted with Filevault2 protects both macOS and Windows, as well as any other VMs; I'm not sure what splitting the partition will do to the encryption - I would think that it would become unencrypted and you'd have to do a separate Filevault encryption for the HPFS partition and store your recovery keys in your keychain, which defeats the key escrow an organization might be using for a single Filevault encrypted disk.

Does anyone have more information on the affect of splitting the partition wrt Filevault encryption and key escrow?

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shigati
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Thank you! Instant resume!

Fusion 8.5.10

MacOS High Sierra 10.13.4

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ColoradoMarmot
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FileVault and MDM key management only works on an unpartitioned disk - that's part of the reason by boot camp can't be encrypted BTW.

You can fix this also by creating a sparse bundle that's HPFS formatted, and put the VM inside it.

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pwbarr
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Upgrade tonight to 10.1.2 100% fixes the issue. Multiple pause/resumes on a file-vaulted Mac are once again virtually instantaneous.

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Mohannad
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Not for me it hasn't. Still same issue.

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swierkowsky
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Yep just after upgrading to 10.1.2 I moved few Windows VM back to APFS file vault-encrypted volume and it appeared to be fine (near-instant resume). Tried launching one VM today and the issue resurfaced again - the resume took 5+ minutes. This is getting ridiculous... The thread is 6 months old and looks like noone in VMware seems to care ... great software indeed...

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Mohannad
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This issue is still present in the Tech Preview. I usually purchase an upgrade every time there's a release but if this isn't resolved it looks like I'll finally be switching to either Parallels or VirtualBox.

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jaraco
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I had this same issue with a Windows 10 x64 VM. I worked with VMWare support to troubleshoot. We did the following on VMWare 10.1.3:

- Recreated the VM from scratch, linking to the original VMDK.

- When creating the VM, in Settings | Advanced, set Hard Disk Buffering to Disabled.

- When creating the VM, chose "Legacy" for the BIOS, although it auto-detected that the original VM had UEFI and switched automatically.

- Allocated 4GB RAM instead of 2GB of RAM.

Ever since, the VM is much faster to restore (about 30 sec vs 300 sec), even after many days of suspend.

I suspect it was the VM recreation that did the trick, although perhaps the Disk Buffering setting was implicated.

I share this information in the hopes it helps others... and I'll report back if restore gets slow again.

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