How to upgrade from WS7 to WS12PRO?

[BobAgi]

I just bought WS12PRO on Black Friday.

I have the latest version of WS7 installed on my HP laptop (in Windows 7 X64 Professional) and a number of Windows and linux guests.

What is the recommended procedure to switch to WS12 from WS7 on the laptop?

- Run the WS12 installer directly or first uninstall WS7?

- How well do the WS settings migrate to the new WS12? I would like to keep my configuration as much as possible.

- Can I start my suspended WS7 guests in WS12 without problems? Or do I need to shut down each guest using WS7 before I upgrade to WS12?

[wila]

Hi,

It is best to shut down existing VMs instead of leaving them in a suspended state.

As for upgrading, you can just run the installer for Workstation 12, it should see Workstation 7 is installed and uninstall that for you before continuing the install.

Not sure how well the WS settings are preserved, I think it depends a bit on the settings and where they have been made.

--

Wil

[BobAgi]

OK,

I opened all of my main guests and shut them down from the operating system. Took a while to do this.

Then I started the WS12PRO installer and it seemed to find WS7 because it offered to upgrade rather than install.

Later on it also asked if I wanted to preserve the configurations so I replied OK.

Now I have WS12 instead of WS7 but I have come across a very strange problem:

When I start WS12 it displays a "Library" pane to the left and it contains a list of guests that look familiar.

But when I click on one of the items there (named as one of the guests I just shut down) WS12 pops up an error message claiming that it cannot find the vmx file, and sure enough the path it is looking in is way off!

This happens on several other guests as well. What is causing this?

I looked at the AppData\Roaming\VMware\preferences.ini to check if there is something strange stored there, but no, all paths here point to the correct locations.

The other files in this directory also do not contain these erroneous paths.

So where can WorkStation12 have gotten these items from?

Where is the data located that is used by the "Library" pane???

Seems like I have to manually correct these.

[wila]

Hi,

Strange,

Normally the path where registered VM are stored is:

C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\VMware\inventory.vmls

and I think the preferences file you are talking about is indeed the favorites list.

But that's the path you looked at?

Are you perhaps running as administrator? That might explain if it is looking at a different set of config files (under your administrator roaming area in that case)

--

Wil

[BobAgi]

I shut down WS12 then edited the files inventory.vmls and preferences.ini.

The erroneous paths were changed to the correct ones.

Then on startup of WS12 I got rid of the error messages.

I have now started an old Win7 guest and I "feel" that it is a lot slower than when I ran it in WS7.

I don't know if this is caused by Win7 furiously checking its state after being idle for a year or so or if WS12 is actually slower than WS7...

[wila]

Hi,

Not sure.

I've seen the report of users reporting that their VMs  did slow down since Workstation 11/Fusion 7.

In some of these situations the users have reported that they got back the "before" performance by downgrading virtual hardware to vHW10.

Other have reported the performance went back to normal after disabling 3D.

Both workarounds are not ideal as in both cases it means giving up on features.

The actual performance of a virtual machine is depending on many factors.

My understanding is as follows:

VMware improves performance on their platform but usually targets the latest hardware (graphic adapters/CPU) and if your host isn't the latest it might actually show a slow down instead of a performance increase.

FWIW I did not really see a slow down down here on my machines and not all of it is that new.

--

Wil

[BobAgi]

I cannot say for sure yet.

I am still busy starting each guest and updating the VMWare Tools. This update is really taking a long time.

But nothing compared to the Windows Update multiple passes to get the Win7 guests up to current state....

It seems as if one has to run 3-4 full updates in suiccession (with reboote inbetween) before Windows is satisfied.

And THIS takes a very long time....

I have not yet come to my Linux Guests, handling the 3rd Win7 guest now.