I have been using VMWare for years, and I have noticed a huge degradation in performance recently.
I run an operating system called SCO Unix Openserver inside of VMWare Workstation and recently noticed that the amount of time it takes to boot the guest OS has increased dramatically.
In the past the boot prompt for the OS would appear almost instantly after starting the guest OS, but is now taking many minutes to get to the boot prompt, and after initiating the boot sequence, the OS takes many more minutes to boot.
Once it boots, it runs as fast as it every did.
The system uses the blc scsi driver. The amount of RAM is very modest, just 768 MB. It runs with one processor / one core. I have tried disabling 3D graphics acceleration, but that had not effect.
This behaviour is noticeable on two different Dell laptops. I tried using vmware player on one of the laptops but the behaviour is the same.
Other guest OSes, such as Ubuntu, centos, etc. all boot normally.
I installed VMWare player on another computer, also a windows 10 computer, and after copying the VM from the laptops to the new computer, vmware player was able to boot the guest os quickly.
So, something in the how vmware workstation is configured or how Windows is configured is resulting in this new slow behaviour, but I don't know where to start looking.
Can someone suggest how to troubleshoot this?
