Win XP guest freezes and then quickly catches up

[RicoUK]

Hi,

Apologies if this has already been tackled elsewhere. If so, can someone point me at the the correct link please?

Host OS Windows 7 Ultimate x64 running on Xeon E5462 @ 2.8GHz (quad core), 16Gb RAM.

Using VMWare Workstation version 8.0.4 build 744019

I have many VMs, some Win XP, some Win7 and about half a dozen varities of Linux.

No VM has more than 4Gb RAM assigned to it and no VM has more than 2 cores assigned to it so I don't think it's a resource issue. I rarely run more than one VM at once.

Recently, some of my Windows XP guests have started to pause for a few seconds where they become completely unresponsive and then all of a sudden it will rush to catch up with all of the things that it should have done. You can see this when doing a big copy or downloading a big file. The progress bar will halt for a few seconds and then for a few seconds the progress bar will go really quickly as if the guest is catching up.

I have the latest version of VMware tools installed and have the guest/host OS time synchronisation checked. I have also tried without it and it made no difference.

Does anybody have any ideas?

Thanks,

[AWo]

Welcome to the forums!

From where (or where to) do you copy the file?

Where are the guest files are located (local disk, external disk, network)?

Do you have virus protection in the guest and the host? Is the *.vmdk file type excluded from virus protection?

AWo

[RicoUK]

Hi,

Thanks for this but I think maybe I didn't explain my problem clearly enough.

The VM freezes with everything except mouse cursor movement. Keyboard input will pause and then all of a sudden the 'missing' keystrokes will catch up. Mouse clicks will not work and then all of sudden they will all arrive at once. The VM will then run fine for a few seconds (20-40) and then it will pause again and after a few seconds (10-20) of this everything will rush to catch up.

It is not all my VMs that exhibit this problem but it has now become enough of them that it is starting to become bothersome. I have upwards of 250 VMs on a large (3TB) hard drive (mapped as drive G:) for testing various product releases, beta tests and interaction with a number of different host OSes. It is only Windows XP SP3 VMs that show this problem but not all of them. I have one base XP Pro VM and clone all new instances from this. I then run windows and anti-virus updates before installing into this 'clean' target environment. The base VM works fine and doesn't exhibit the pausing problem and not all clones exhibit this pausing problem either.

Are there any diagnostics I can run to try and track this down?

[AWo]

I tried to figure out if there is a disk performance problem which can lead to a guest hanging for short periods.

You can post the vmware.log file of the affected guest.

VMware tools installed inside the guest (I suppose you did)? Reduce the number of vCPUs to one in that particular machine, just as a test.

AWo

[RicoUK]

Hi AWo,

The latest VM I cloned only has a single CPU assigned to it.

VMware tools is installed and updated - I forgot to mention that I do that as part of the VM update after I clone it from the base.

The vmware.log file is zipped and attached. I had a quick look through but am not too familiar with most of the stuff in there. I have disabled floppy disk support from the VM and (for now) it seems to be OK. I will keep testing and update my findings.

Thanks again.

[AWo]

"Seems to be OK", that means it is running smooth again? You disabled it after generationg that log file, didn't you?

Do you have something that wants to access the floppy? I'll never saw such a huge amount of these messages in a vmware.log.

AWo

[RicoUK]

Yes. "seems to be OK" means running smoothly.:smileyblush:

I disabled the floppy after taking the log file.

To my knowledge there is nothing that should be accessing the floppy drive. It's a vanilla Windows XP Pro SP3 at this point. I have yet to put my test stuff in there.

I'll test this one a bit longer and if it seems to stay running smoothly, I'll locate my other problem VMs and remove floppy support from those too.

I'll leave the question as unanswered for now but will close it if all goes well after some more testing.

[RicoUK]

Still running smoothly without the horrible pauses this morning so I'm going to mark this as asnwered now. Thanks for your help.

I would be interesed in finding out what causes a vanilla XP installation to thrash the floppy disc like that though,...

[AWo]

Fine. Yes in deed, that would be interesting.

AWo