VMware Workstation 9 - Performance issues

[MariusRoma]

After upgrading from Workstation 7 to Workstation 9 I have performance issues.

The host PC has 4 GB RAM, a 4core Intel CPU and Windows XP SP3.

My feeling (it's a feeling, I don't have detailed data) is that guest VMs run slower and that while a guest VM is running it's quite impossible to run other applications on the host PC, mainly Outlook.

Performances are even worse if guest VM load 64 bit operating systems.

Given I can't upgrade the host's HW, what can I do to locate possible bottlenecks and improve VMware Workstation 9 performances?

Regards

marius

[continuum]

Did you miss anything in WS 7 ?

For a XP host with 4 GB RAM I would not recommend to switch to WS 9.

WS 9 needs way more resources to acchieve the same performance as WS 7 - I would consider reverting to WS 7

[birdie]

4GB of RAM are more than enough to run VMWare Workstation 9.

Please, fire up task manager and see vmware processes' CPU consumption.

You may also want to check your HDD activity and check if your HDD still has DMA enabled (in device manager) - what you perceive as slowdowns may in fact be the problem with your HDD performance.

Also check your free space and fragmenation.

Also try temporarily uninstalling your AntiVirus (don't just disable it) - some AV can significantly slow down your computer in a presence of VMWare.

[nshetty]

Hello Marius,

How many VMs are running on the workstation, what are the resources that is assigned, CPU and memory ?

What is the OS running on host machine ? Windows or Linux

What is the hard drive capacity ? Free space ?

Workstation 9 has a number of new added features when compared to the previous versions.

Slow peformance when running workstation could be a overprovisioning issue or applications using all the resources.

Task manager is a basic tool that you could check the process that is eating up all the resources. You could also use other 3rd party perf mon tools to check the performance.

--NS

[MariusRoma]

I made some tests and my feeling is that if I run the same VMs with VMware Player instead of VMware Workstation (VMware Player is installed by default when installing VMware Workstation) the performance are better.

Is it possible?

Does it make sense to use VMware Workstation when superior featueres like taking snapshots are required and VMware Player whe it's enough to run the guest VMs?

Regards

marius