VMWare VM's becomes un-responsive when external processes use CPU

[nielsb_11]

Right, I have a situation where my hardware is a MacBook Pro 2.4 Ghz Core Duo 2(Santa Rosa) with 4 gig RAM. My host is Ububntu 7.10 64 bits, and I'm running VMWare Workstation 6.02 (64 bits).

My guest OS is 32 bits Windows 2008 Server (latest VMWare tools are installed in the guest). I have allocated 2 Gig (2048 Mb) of ram to the guest and have set up the guest to see 2 processors . Everything works fine as long as I do all work in the VM. However as soon as I do anything outside of the VM which requires CPU, then my VM becomes un-responsive and basically crawls. The same thing happens if I try to start a second VM (a VM allocated 1024 Mb RAM).

I have checked the setting to "Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM", and memory trimming is disabled for the individual VM's. One thing though is that the setting to "Enable VMWare paravirtual kernel support" is greyed out for my various VM's.

Also, I've tried with 64-bit guests and no difference. Any ideas anyone?

Niels

[markvor]

Hi Niels,

have you tried to run your VM with only one virtual processor ? If you got only a physical single processor system vmware suggests to use only one virtual processor.

I were at the same situation with my macbook pro with a Core Duo 2 Processor with Mac OS 10.5 on my Host. I configured a 2 processor vm´, could work in excellent perfromance inside the vm and if i switched to the mac os and back to vm, the virtual machine stops responding. After i removed the second processor in my vm, i tried the sam again and everything works fine.

Markus Vorderer

[nielsb_11]

Markus,

That was what I was going to try next. Thanks for the response.

I'll report back.

Niels

[nielsb_11]

OK, so I changed my VM to use onl one proc - and it seems to have done the trick. Thanks!!!

Niels