Windows 11 Slow - Recommendations

[CafNetMatt]

I have a MBP 16", 6-Core i7, 32GB RAM running Fusion 12.2.4

I have a Windows 11 VM that is an upgrade from a fresh installation of Windows 10.

VM specs:  2 processors, 8GB RAM, 60GB NVMe disk, 2GB Video with the battery life setting as 'Use High Performance Graphics for 3D Applications only".  vTPM installed and the VM is encrypted (didn't use the "software TPM").  It running hardware version 19.

The issue I started having is the VM has become so slow that it's unusable.  I log in and a click can take minutes to respond.  I was going to run the Optimization Tool on it but I can't even get a browser to open.  What strange is that when I first got Win 11 installed it ran fine.  I can't remember what, if anything, I changed.

The only thing I adjusted was video RAM; I kicked it up to 4GB.  I've tried disabled 3D graphics but that just causes a black screen. Now I've got it set to 2GB and that runs a slight bit faster but still not enough to even launch an application.

I did notice one thing.  Whenever it boots up, I get that "No 3d support is available from this host".  This is strange because I checked the MBP and it shows it's using the discrete video card.  Do I need to make any manual changes to the vmx file?

Can someone suggest hardware settings that they've found work well with Windows 11? 

[gringley]

I was fooling around this weekend and saw an alert from Windows Security that Memory Integrity was turned off and should be turned on. I turned that on and the guest became incredibly slow taking minutes to load everything after a boot.  I disabled Memory Integrity and the guest performed normally again.  This feature is under Device Security.  (It turned out one of my upgrade VMs had not turned it on due to a VPN driver so I am rid of that now at least.)

[CafNetMatt]

Thanks for the reply.

My VM is so slow I'm having to figure out how to turn off that feature.  It can take 5 minutes for a single click to actually process.  The VM is completely unusable as it is. 

I'm thinking about booting from the recovery partition and editing the registry from the CLI otherwise It'll be faster to just build a new VM.  Sadly, I didn't take a snapshot before making that change.  Lesson learned.

[Technogeezer]

Using the standard encryption that Fusion 12 provides for virtual machines required to obtain the TPM module does impact performance. Every read from the virtual disk must be decrypted, and every write must be encrypted.  It's hard to say exactly how bad that is in practice, but that's additional CPU resource that's required. 

Knowing what I know now, I would never recommend someone use the experimental virtual TPM of Fusion 12. There are too many restrictions on it - the least of which being that you can not move that VM to another machine because there's no easy way to get the encryption key required to open the VM.

You might want to look at the Fusion 22H2 Tech Preview if running Windows 11 VMs - even on Intel Macs. The encryption options in the Tech Preview allow a "partial" encryption of the VM (only files outside of those that make up the virtual disk). Similar to what the experimental vTPM feature did, the Tech Preview's partial encryption allows configuration of the TPM device without the overhead of encryption/decryption of the virtual disk.  Unlike the experimental Fusion 12 vTPM, it provides much better management of the encryption key. It fixes the deficiencies present in Fusion 12's experimental vTPM that made it unworkable in practice.

The encryption/TPM features present in the Tech Preview are anticipated to be present in the next Fusion version.

[xSgfLTCZAR]

Ran into the same issue with Memory Integrity. I saw it was off and thought I should turn it on to make everything in Windows Security green. Then the virtual machine slowed to a crawl on subsequent boots and the fan on the host took off.

[baccheschi]

Didi anyone resolved this? I suddenly started to have the same problem.

[Technogeezer]

Have you double checked that a Windows update hasn't decided to be nice and turn on Memory Integrity for you?

[Vanishingpoint]

Checking to make sure that "memory integrity" is turned off might not enough. Make sure to click the blue "dismiss" text under "memory integrity." Even though my memory integrity was off, dismissing the security warning dramatically improved system performance, and quieted the fan.

[Vanishingpoint]

Good luck.

[Crasucks]

How do you turn off memory integrity in Vmware Workstation pro 17?  

My new 17 license has absolutely cripped development, it is essentially useless now. I should have stayed with Vmware Workstation pro 14. I can't get any support from Vmware either, all methods of creating a ticket won't work. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

This is the Fusion forum.  You'll have to ask in the workstation forum.