Hello. I have VMWare Workstation 12.5.5 (latest update level), running Windows 10 Pro x64 as host and as guest. I also have a Windows 7 guest that I'm testing this issue with. Everything licensed and legit, no warez. The title/subject of the thread kinda 'explains it all'.
My Windows 10 guest used to run flawlessly. No major issues. Maybe an audio hiccup now and again under heavy load. Now every 20-45 seconds the system freezes, unresponsive against clicks or UI I/O for up to a minute. Wash, rinse, repeat. The mouse still moves, but whatever icon state it was in (arrow, hourglass, hand, etc...) is stuck for that period of time. Clicks do not register until after the system unfreezes; all clicks. Audio (such as system chimes) stop, and then resume and stutter until they end. Clicks often get malformed into click-drag. Nothing changed hardware or software wise except for updates between when it started this and now, about two weeks ago. Oh, I lied, I replaced my PSU.
The host is completely unaffected when the guest freezes. CPU, memory and disk usage all remain low when the guest freezes, both within the guest and on the host. Performance counters and logs show nothing out of the ordinary before, during, or after the freeze within the guest. It persists after a total reinstall of Host and Guest operating systems. Installations proceeded quickly, normally, and without any negative behavior. A Windows 7 guest is to a great degree almost completely unaffected, but some clicks don't seem to register well. Tomorrow's day of use will really tell if it is fully unaffected and the clicking thing is largely psychosomatic. During Windows 10 guest freezes, the Windows 7 guest appears unaffected.
Starting the Windows 10 host seems slower than it used to be as well. It takes 50 seconds between when I hit 'Play' and when I see the Windows 10 logo, and a total of 2:03 from when I hit Play until I'm at login. Disk usage during boot time maxed out at around 7MB/s with a couple of very small 23MB/s bursts.
I have noticed that general physical disk usage (D drive where the VMs are) only peak around 9-11MB/s and typically never exceed that. Usage never reaches the full drive speed until I suspend the VM and it writes out memory to disk. Then it rockets up and saturates SATA.
Troubleshooting steps have been,
Defrag everything. Host, Vmware files and within the guest.
Move guest files from spinning WD Black to 850 EVO, move OS and VMWare Workstation from 850 EVO to 960 Pro.
Try copy of VM on the 960 Pro.
Update firmware for motherboard and hard drives.
Reinstall Windows 10 from scratch on Host, and set up a completely fresh Win 10 Guest (after testing previous guest).
Disable floppy drive in VMware (and in config) and in virtual BIOIS
Disable access to CDROM.
Disable access to USB.
Disable 3D acceleration both within the machine config as well as turned down all in-UI effects down to virtually nill.
Ensured all drivers were updated, and then stepped back a version to make sure a recent update didn't break something.
Locked page file to one size.
Ensured all VMs were preallocated.
Excluded VM locations and file types from AV scans.
Disabled AV.
Host:
i5-4690k CPU
24GB RAM
960 Pro m.2 NVMe C drive (Vmware Workstation application installed here, performs in excess of 860MB/s)
850 EVO SATA D drive (Dedicated wholly to VMs, less than half full, regularly performs in the ~480MB/s range)
GTX 970 video card
GA-Z97X-SLI motherboard
Guest (7 and 10):
3 Core (ran on 4 core fine before)
8GB RAM
Recommended+ C drive.
My gut is kinda telling me that something in Windows 10 changed. An update somewhere along the way. Everything was fine with Win7 and Win10 as hosts and then bam, started having issues and no bueno.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. This is making it really hard to work.
Thanks.
-David
