VM Ware Workstation Pro 12 - Cores vs. Processors

[shawn1874]

My laptop has the following characteristics.

Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ Processor (6M Cache, up to 3.70 GHz) Product Specifications

VMWare version

VMware® Workstation 12 Pro

12.1.1 build-3770994

My host OS is Windows XP Pro SP3

I have configured my virtual machine with 4 GB of a memory out of the 12 GB of memory that is physically installed on my laptop.  The laptop is a quad core laptop which means 4 processors but processors are specified in VMWare as a combination of processors and cores.  Does it make any difference whether I specify 2 processors and 1 core vs 1 processor and 2 cores?  Either way, my laptop has 4 cores available.  I'm in the process of learning how to tune my VM because I am suffering from severe performance problems, particularly with copying of files from network shares to the guest OS.  The network utilization never goes above 1%, while the CPU utilization remains below 5 % during the file copy.  What can I try in order to tune network performance?  By the way NAT is the network configuration that I have chosen.

[gimmely]

Whose Task Manager is posted here, the host or the guest?  How's the performance if you copy the same file from the same network share to the host?  How's memory usage on the host in both copying to the host and to the guest?  Maybe there's not much memory left on the host with the guest and other apps running.

[shawn1874]

The posted image is the task manager of the guest OS, not the Host OS.  The performance of copying is significantly better using the host OS.  I wouldn't be posting this question otherwise.  However, it's reasonable to ask about differences so here is some more information.

File size of test file = 604, 795 KB

Guest OS is installed to an external USB drive drive

Performance of network to Guest OS

Copy of the file takes 15 minutes, 33 seconds.

Performance of network to Host OS

Copy of the same file takes 5 minutes, 19 seconds

Network utilization is significantly higher on the host.  Why would that be?  Also I would like to see if someone knows the answer about how to best specify the processor in the VM settings.  Does it matter if I specify 2 processors 1 core, vs. 1 processor 2 cores?  The user documentation for the software does not provide much information about that setting.

[gimmely]

What if you built the "same" guest on the hard drive of the host, then tried it again?  I have to admit that I'm not an expert in this area, but doubt increasing numbers of core/CPU would help - I can be totally wrong here, so I'd like to be "educated".  Network utilization does show a big difference between the two cases, but it can be caused by other factors than core/CPU, such as the USB port.  Again, I'm still curious about memory usage.

[shawn1874]

It isn't an option because my host hard disk is rather small.  The host hard disk only has 111GB or so of actual space, and I need every bit of that which is why the guest OS has been setup on an external 2TB hard drive.  I've tried various settings for memory, and nothing has changed. Currently the guest OS has been allocated 4GB out of the 12GB of the physical memory with no noticeable improvement.  Previously I have tried 2GB and 512 MB.  At this point I'm unclear about expectations.  What network utilization should I expect to see, and is it typical for network copying to be 3 times slower between a VM and a typical network?

[gimmely]

I've copied files/file systems three or more times the size of your file to my VMs, and never seen a big difference.  Of course, it's a different story to copy files out of VMs.  However, my VMs are on local hard drive, which is why I suggest you to build a VM locally to see the result.  Now that you said it's not possible, I'm afraid you'd have to take others' words.

I did use/test VMs on USBs a couple of times at early days of me using VMware.  What I remember seeing is relatively low performance in just doing certain things.  Also, I remember seeing explanations from others that VMware might be updating certain files whenever needed, esp. with IO activities.  But, I guess that's all I can say for this case.

[RDPetruska]

VMware® Workstation 12 Pro

12.1.1 build-3770994

My host OS is Windows XP Pro SP3

Well, this is impossible - the last version to work on Windows XP (or any 32-bit Windows) is Player 6 / Workstation 10.  So I'm guessing that XP is your guest.

I have configured my virtual machine with 4 GB of a memory

Again, if it is a 32-bit Windows XP guest, the highest amount of RAM it can support is 3.2GB (or something close to that).  So you are wasting resources assigned to a guest VM that it can't use.  Have you also tried with just one vCPU instead of 2?

Does it make any difference whether I specify 2 processors and 1 core vs 1 processor and 2 cores?

From the VMware employees' posts on this forum, no.  The only reason for the difference is some software is licensed per CPU, others per core - so you can configure your VM to suit your licensing needs best.  Actual vCPU resources and performance is identical.

[Security_Financ]

Didn't see this - sorry if I missed it.

What USB connection are you using for the guest? 2 or 3? Are there any issues in device manager with missing drivers?

Try running crystal disk mark against the USB drive and see the performance characteristics. This might simply be an issue with the subsystem.