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vmwaresec_rs
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

VMware Workstation 16 running on Linux Mint Cinnamon - SLOW

Hello,

I have a Dell XPS 15 9550 laptop that has been upgraded to 32GB RAM, has a 2TB Sabrent Rocket NVMe drive, running Linux Mint Cinnamon 20.2 and I have been struggling with VMware Workstation 16 on this system for months and months now.

I have numerous VM's installed on the system and I can run them but I find the behavior and responsiveness to be really, really slow and it regularly demonstrates a very jerky lack of responsiveness. While running a VM the entire OS will become unresponsive for 30 seconds to minutes at a time and then I will regain some level of control for a little while and then the system reverts to an unresponsive state ... rinse, wash, repeat ...

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalling the software (VMware Workstation 16) several times and this has not made any difference at all.

So ... I tried an experiment ... I installed Oracle VirtualBox to see how that would perform.

Well ... what a difference!!

I have 2 Windows 10 VM's, each with 8GB or RAM, and a Windows 2008 server, a Windows XP system, and 3 Ubuntu VM's (all the old systems are because I am doing Kali / Metaspolit training) and with ALL of these running at the same time the entire OS and each of the VM's hums along without a care in the world.

The system is actually behaving the way I would expect when running all of these VM's. Bottom line here is that I have been struggling with extremely frustrating poor performance using VMware Workstation 16 for months, and months and VirtualBox is blowing it away.

In general I love VMware, I have a Raspberry Pi ESXi cluster and an Intel NUC running ESXi all reporting into a vCenter instance, we use VMware at work, etc., etc. but I just cannot bear to use VMware Workstation when experiencing this abysmal performance.

Edit / adding another data point that I think is pertinent: I see the same super slow jerky performance when I use the "Launch Remote Console" option from vCenter (which appears to just launch VMware Player). So this isn't even really using any of the local computers resources (no vmdk disk access, no memory to run the VM, etc.) and it still performs poorly.

Anyone have any ideas what the issue might be? Any suggested solutions?

Thanks,

Robert

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linutic
Contributor
Contributor

I've had the problem on ubuntu 20.04.  There is a posted fix to disable transparent_hugepages, that used to work, but no longer does.

Here's the solution that worked for me:

https://gist.github.com/2E0PGS/2560d054819843d1e6da76ae57378989

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