Hi, recently the vmware-vmx.exe processes on the host have shown more CPU activity than the underlying guest machines, and this has started to result in lower performance within the guest machines.
The host machine is a clean Windows install with only VMWare Workstation installed and running. Within VMWare there are 2 Windows guests running and 1 Ubuntu guest.
The issue is each guest is idle and only shows 1 - 4% of CPU utilization. However the host machine reports a steady state of 50-65% CPU activity, with the vmware-vmx.exe processes as being the only active processes on the host. Previously host activity hovered around 10% when all the guests were idle, which was expected since it was the added total of the 3 guests.
This behavior only started recently, however I have made no changes to VMWare or the underlying guests. The excesive CPU cycles are also not related to any single guest machine, with all 3 vmware-vmx.exe processes on the host showing 15-20% activity when the underlying guest is completely idle.
Is there anything I should do to improve performance. To me this is clearly a VMWare tuning issue.
The host is a clean install of Windows XP x64 with all of the lastest drivers, updates, bios, etc. It also passes all memory/CPU stress tests and is solid.
AMD Athlon X2 (Brisbane stepping)
Memory 6 GB
Motherboard: ASUS M2N-E m
Hard drive: 500GB in RAID 1
Host OS: Windows XP x64 Professional (clean install, no apps other than VMWare, passes all CPU/memory checks)
VMware Workstation 6.0.2
Any help would be really appreciated.
