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jevel
Contributor
Contributor

Windows 10 on Fusion 8.5 incredibly slow.

Installed first on a MBP13 retina 2013 as a VM, but the installation was incredibly slow. I then installed in Boot Camp, and the installation works as expected. If I try to start the Boot Camp partition in Fusion it is back to lag city again.

Made the conclusion that the MBP13 had trouble, installed on a brand new MBP15 with touch bar. Same thing happens. Start the Boot Camp partition in Fusion and it just hangs at the boot screen, reading from disk and doing the oocasional small download from the network. Working as expected in Boot Camp.

I tried searching a little around the forums here, but it seems that most threads with the same theme is from earlier versions of Fusion and the beta of Windows 10. A few of the threads I find seems similar, but none has a good explanation or a fix of any sort. I run Windows 10 as a VM on my iMac just fine, so I know it is possible, but I'm hoping that anyone has an idea what I can do on the MBP15 to get the Boot Camp working.

-KJ

19 Replies
hyan
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Hi jevel,

Welcome at Fusion community~!

You could try to do following steps:

1. Check VM configuration from Settings > Processores & Memory, configure Processors to 2 cores and Memory to 4096 MB

2. Close Troubleshooting at Settings > Advanced and set it to None, enable Hard disk buffering to Automatic at same page

3. Upgrade Mac OS and Fusion to latest Version, and make sure your VM has latest hardware version (restart and upgrade VM if Fusion prompt)

4. Close Auto-upgrade in the VM

If the steps don't work, please upload Fusion log here for further help, thanks!

Harry

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Justchillin
Contributor
Contributor

‌I've experienced this on two different Macbook 12' m7 spec machines.

Something must be not be very compataible with some Mac models and VMware Fusion?

I tried for some time to figure it out but the Win 7 VMs just grind to a halt after a few minutes. Tried many different configurations for the Vm but same result. Guest became almost unresponsive after a period of time and CPU was often @100%

Interestingly the the previous version of Fusion worked fine on the same hardware as above.

In the end I moved the VM to VirtualBox in desparation and it's worked perfectly since.

Did the same on another macbook 12' and same result - works just fine. obviously VirtualBox is a completely different path to go down but i can't figure out what the issue is with Fusion and virtualbox works.

If your in desperate need - perhaps try it.

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gomatt
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks for posting. I was also going to buy another machine to see if that was the issue. Everything worked great 3 years ago, now everything is slow and buggy. If it doesn't get fixed soon I'll start carrying two laptops around with me, have no other options.

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davesampieri
Contributor
Contributor

I have a Spring 2016 MacBook Pro 15" Retina, 16 GB Ram with 512GB SSD (BTW, the SSD is unbelievably fast!!)

I've been using VMWare for well over a decade, both on personal computers as a programmer all the way up to complex ESX environments.

I loaded Fusion Pro, now version 8.5.3, and have been having horrible speed on my Windows 10 image.

For testing, I created a brand new install of Win 10 Pro with Office 2016 and Notepad++.

It is literally unusable. In any view you choose (Unity, Single Window or Full screen), lagging keyboard, locked applications. I have gone with the suggested settings for the memory and cores; I have bumped the memory and cores as high as 8 GB and 4 cores.

It is unusable.

I broke down and bought Parallels. I had to, and you know what? Never going back! I took the same brand new Win 10 install, imported it to Parallels and ran it from there.

Sorry VMware, but Parallels in Coherence mode with 2GB of ram is UNREAL! I have Outlook 2016 with 2 plugins, which is why I don't use native Office for Mac, and Notepad++ open all day. Five days now without a hiccup.

Unplug from my external monitor, everything resizes; unplug from my Ethernet, it continues to use my WiFi. I could go on, but why bother.

I'm willing to pay their subscription plan if it keeps up like this.

I have nothing to do with the company...just saying.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

How many physical cores are in the machine?  The rule of thumb is no more than N-1 to a virtual machine, and Windows 10 really wants a minimum of 2 cores.  My VM on my 2013 13" is far slower than on my 2013 15" for example - because the 2 core VM starves the host for cycles.

You should also check to make sure that Win10 isn't updating in the background, running a virus scan, or a system restore point.

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davesampieri
Contributor
Contributor

For me, I have 4 physical cores. I shut everything off...it makes no difference. I imported the VM image into Parallels and it works fine.

There are other posts about the same problem - no one seems to have an answer. It's not about memory or cores or updates, at least not for a large community of users.

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ic34xe
Contributor
Contributor

I am also having this issue and its 100% related to Version 8.5, i have tested the vm in VBox and parallels with no issue.

Issues in VM Ware fusion on Windows 10 only!

1: Mouse hit not accurate

2: Host fans build up fast but do not on win7 and other linux hosts

3: Applications lag

4: have repaired the windows 10 install to no avail

5: have increased memory and cpus to no avail

Time to try other less expensive options it would seem as they just work!!!

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Justchillin
Contributor
Contributor

Its ugly i Know, but try switching off all 3D graphics acceleration and see how the machine runs.

Not to say its the entire issue but I've switched off this for the Win10 hosts I've been testing and things seem to improve a fair bit.

This goes with saying that previous versions of Fusion were running the same win10 host just fine with 3D enabled.  But now are not.

Be interested to see if anyone else sees improvement.

Unfortunately I'm not sure the Fusion product is much of a thing now for Vmware.  Updates / fixes may be a back burner thing.

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ic34xe
Contributor
Contributor

Cheers did try the GPU fix not much different and a couple of vmx suggestions which i ended up rolling back, i think its a case of let this run for now and go for another product later in the year which is infuriating after updating to 8.x in october.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Have you tried creating a clean win10 VM directly in fusion from original install media?

Moving between hypervisors can cause problems, and converting physical machines almost always does.

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DWSam
Contributor
Contributor

Can't speak for the other folks, but yes, as mentioned above, a brand new install. Win 64 Pro, nothing else on it. Let it do updates and malware scanning. Then just a dog/pig. Gave it more ram and processor - absolutely no change. Loaded Office 2016. You'd think the performance would be worse, but it wasn't.

CPU was not high on the Mac or the Win 10 VM. Memory was fine. Disk performance was fine.

Converted to Parallels, runs like a champ.

Please, I know everyone's heart is in the right place, but seriously, most of us have tried everything to troubleshoot and tune...it's just a problem with VMWare.

You can't deny that converting a VM image to Parallels is a good and valid test. The results speak for themselves. The performance is at least as good as what VMWare was before this started happening. I have converted my original Win10 image to Parallels and am thrilled with the performance.

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gomatt
Contributor
Contributor

I switched to PARALLELS AND NEVER GOING BACK TO VMWARE.

It RUNS BETTER THEN NATIVE! PARALLELS FOR LIFE!!!!!!!!

BYE BYE VMWARE (sorry I gave you 6 months to fix it)

ic34xe
Contributor
Contributor

Im currently trialing parrallels and will swap if theres improvement

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owells
Contributor
Contributor

Just wanted to "co-sign" on this and state that I'm experiencing the same issue. Windows 10 on Fusion 8.5 starts off Ok but soon becomes unusable. I'm talking about clicks taking 10-15 seconds to even register "unusable". The same Windows 10 install on previous versions of Fusion did not have this issue

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skadoo
Contributor
Contributor

Like others mentioned I too am having the same issue with Windows 10 on Fusion. I tried Parallels are the Windows 10 VM works perfectly. Honestly hope there is a fix for this. Rather give my $ to VMware instead of Parallels.

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IlDavo
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Running Fusion 8.5.3 (4696910) on MaOS Sierra 10.12.2 on Mac mini (Late 2012) with 2.6GHz i7 16GB RAM and all SSD drives.

2 Windows 10 Fusion guests ran just fine for a few months on previous MacOS and Fusion releases on same hardware, then applied MacOS updates and Fusion updates at about the same time (I know, unwise...) and Windows 10 guests slowed to an unusable state.

Blaming Windows 10, I sought fixes in Windows 10 communities (reducing and then ultimately eliminating Cortana functionality, reducing Windows 10 appearance features, etc.) that seemed to reduce the lag, but eventually, the Windows 10 guests again arrived at an unusable state.

I found this thread on communities.vmware.com.

I disabled "Accelerate 3D Graphics," turned off "Settings->Advanced->Troubleshooting," and enabled "Hard disk buffering."  No change.

"Workaround" that Appears to have Positive Results:

I then observed suggestions concerning CPU cores and RAM allocation and changed from: 4 processor cores (of the 8 "CPU core" threads that VMware Fusion "sees") and 8132MB RAM (of the 16384MB available) to 2 processor cores with 8132MB RAM, and the Windows 10 guest become usable!

Further results from others who try to diagnose/fix appreciated -- I'm not giving up on VMware, as I rely on symbiosis with VMware Workstation that I run on PC hosts.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

yeah, that's a 4 core machine, so 2 is the most that you should give to an individual guest.  Threads don't count - it's physical cores.  That's been true since day one, but sometimes it's more noticeable than others, and Sierra seems to have a bunch more threads that run than previous versions.   You can run multiple 2 core guests (though I would avoid having the total ram for all machines exceed the RAM in the machine minus 4GB - for a 16 GB machine, reserve 4 for the host OS, then use up to 12 total across all VM's).

IlDavo
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks very kindly for your reply, dlhotka!

I'm not thrilled to hear that allocating VMware Fusion guests more than 2 CPU cores on a 4-physical-core i7 host Mac is inadvisable -- my Windows 10 guest VMs previously ran much faster and worked better with my process-intensive Adobe Photoshop (inside the VMs), but you would appear to know what you're talking about, as your guidance matches my current experience.

Darned shame that the latest Sierra OS apparently contends, so extensively, for CPU resources that my Windows 10 Fusion guests no longer run as well as they used to.  I get the logic that indicates allocating 4 CPU's to guests on a 4 CPU host machine is unwise, but it used to work w/Fusion on previous MacOS releases. This does tempt me to experiment and find out if Parallels encounters the same limitations.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Yeah, it's not always true, but when it is, it bites hard.  It all depends on what's running on the host and guest - well behaved applications may release cores fast enough, and sometimes it works.  Parallels will have similar contention issues - though different configurations hit the two differently.

For what it's worth, Adobe does have native apps.  For pre-CC options, they used to let you port licenses from one to the other, but I don't know if the downloads are still available.