I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 on my laptop and have vmplayer running a Windows 7 guest OS. The Windows 7 running vmplayer however constantly takes between 40-80% of the CPU. There is nothing really happening in the Windows 7 instance. This seems to be too high. What can I do to debug/fix this?
Had a similar problem. So far, the solution that works best for me seems to be to kill and/or restart Adobe flash in the guest OS. In my case, this means restarting the browser in the guest OS...
But I'm not running a browser at all nor am I running flash - all I run is Playon.
Have You checked guest OS's task manager? Maybe some background process?
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VM or Not to VM...?
That is the question!
Process Explorer reports that the guest (4 CPUs - 2 Gig memory) is hovering @ around 98% idle.
I am having a similar problem with ESXI 5.0. I have four ubuntu 12.04.1 64bit guests. All with 2 virtual CPUs and between 1gb and 2gb each. Somtimes, one of the hosts is reported to be using nearly 5ghz of CPU, even then when I log into the guest OS and run top, the system is at 98%-99% idle. I have logging enabled on that virtual machine, and the only things in the logs anywhere near the time of the CPU spike is "vmx| GuestRpcSendTimedOut: message to toolbox timed out." This happens every time. The problem occurs every 10-12 hours consistently.