I have an annoying issue affecting one of the systems on which I run VMware workstation. They're all WinXP SP3 hosts, and all WinXP SP3 guests.
What happens is that intermittently the host's desktop will freeze. Other host applications remain running and responsive, but the Explorer desktop and taskbar stop dead. CtrlAltDel works fine; mouse works fine; the VM guest keeps running. The freeze lasts usually a couple of minutes, then everything goes back to normal.
Monitoring I've done shows that it might happen when the guest accesses its disks. I've had a XP guest running PostgreSQL do it regularly, probably when the DB server does an auto-vacuum; and I've had the host desktop freeze for the whole time the guest was running the Windows disk defragmenter.
In the first case, I had PerfMon on host and guest. There was a small spike in disk activity on the guest, which seemed to give a huge amount f disk activity on the host.
The machine I see this on has an Intel 6850 dual-core processor; 4GB physical memory; 1GB memory for the VM. Disks are SATA II 750GB, and the OS and the VM files are on separate spindles. The VMs have up-to-date VMware Tools installed; the physical disks and virtual disks are defragmented.
On the host I run Diskkeeper in background mode; turning this off doesn't seem to change anything.
I get the effect on VMware workstation 6.0, 6.1 and 6.5.
What might I look at or tweak here?
Thanks
Alan
