Windows 7 (x86) guest freezing for minutes at a time.

[0WayneH0]

I 'm running Workstation 7.1.0 on a Windows 7 (x64) host. I have recently set up a new Windows 7 (x86) guest with all my office applications (MS Office 2010, Communicator, X1 etc) to replace a trusty VM that is running XP, Office 2003, so basically I'm upgrading Office and the guest OS. The XP VM is old enough that it was originally converted to VMware from MS VPC 2007.

I've been using VMware now for some time, and have quite a number of different VMs that I use, but I am finding that I am running into trouble with this particular VM out of them all. Unfortunately, I have to run a meeting using this VM tonight, and right at the moment I am trying to encourage my company to buy more VMware licenses to satisfy our needs to furnish developers with 64-bit development and testing environments, so it's not going to look good if this VM locks up during the meeting!

Here are some details about the VM:

1. Windows 7 Professional x86 (Clean install 2 days ago)

2. Office 2010, X1, Skype, Communicator R2, CheckPoint VPN-1, 7 Zip, FoxIt Reader, FireFox, MS Office LiveMeeting 2007 R2.

3. Windows Search service disabled (it's the first thing I do on any Vista/Win7 machine).

4. HomeGroup services disabled; I stick to credentials based networking.

5. A/V software on the host: Avast 5.0 (VM folder excluded from scanning).

6. A/V software on the guest: Avast 5.0.

7. Superfetch *enabled* on the guest since I have allocated it 3Gb of RAM (normally I have this at 1Gb to 2Gb). Host has 8Gb.

8. Memory page trimming disabled.

9. One snapshot created during initial setup, although I intend to delete that shortly.

When the VM locks up, it becomes non responsive and if the display is still visible, the system clock gets frozen on whatever time the lock up occurred. If I wait some time (typically several minutes), it comes back. A lot of the time I'm prevented from even getting to the host (if in full screen or quick switch views). Unfortunately I can't get much feedback on what is happening during he lock up except the vmware-vmx.exe was maxing out the CPU (2 allocated cores out of 4) in the lock up that happened last night.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[0WayneH0]

Just after posting this my VMware Communities update e-mail came in and I noticed in a previous thread I was involved in (http://communities.vmware.com/thread/269854) that I had a similar freeze on the XP VM that I mention above (although I had clearly forgotten all about that!). It turns out the lock up on the XP VM was due to HP printer software, that I also just installed (last night) on the Win 7 guest (and which I omitted from my list above).

I'm going to make an educated guess that it is the same issue so I have disabled the same problematic service now on the Win 7 guest and will see where that takes me. I'm fairly confident this will be the problem.

2 cheers for the Communities e-mail.

Sorry for wasting people's time.

[0WayneH0]

Just had another lock up.... bugger. I guess it's something else. :smileycry:

Just add it to the list of flaky internet, IT taking parts of our corporate network down with no warning, IT's backups crashing our Perforce server every day, VPN connection that prompts for credentials every 30 seconds to connect to a site that I don't need to connect to and generally nothing working when I need it to. Sucks worse when its a weekend and I'm wasting my own time on it, only because I lost time during the week due to another batch of problems.

I think it's time to buy an i-pad and smoke weed for a living... working with real computers is too soul draining.

Over and out.

[0WayneH0]

Just in case people read these posts (and therefore hopefully someone will benefit, even if it's only me in 6 months time) I'll submit an update on this problem. I had a number of subsequent freezes, some that would recover and others that required a hard reset of my system. For some reason the lock up was enough to prevent me from accessing my host machine too. I typically run VMware workstation in quick switch view and it is impossible to minimize the workstation app to get to the host. Other conventional mechanisms fail too, leaving a machine that is hopelessly lost. Trying to figure out what (if any) process or processes were causing the lock up was impossible on the VM since it was completely locked up! For a while I tried running taskmgr in the foreground all the time in the hope I would catch it before the VM became un-usable, but no such luck.

Anyway, after the most recent lock up I went into resource monitor (after resetting the VM since it was toast) and noticed that a wad of CPU was associated with Avast 5.0 trying to auto-update. Now either those performance stats were left overs from prior to the reset or simply since the previous auto-update failed (presumably caused the lock-up) it was trying again right after the restart. I took a punt and disabled Avast 5.0's auto update and undertale that process manually only (bummer, but so be it). So far, touch wood, in the last few days I have not had a further lock up. Yay!

So when setting up new VMs I need to remember to disable all HP services for my C4380 printer (if I install it) and also not allow Avast to update, plus all the regular stuff like not allowing Avast on the host to scan the Virtual Machine folder, shared folders and so on.

OK, so now this is documented for me next time I run into this same problem, but again it raises a question that I think I may have asked on these forums in the past, and that is about running A/V software on a guest. Are there recommendations for this? I guess since I am running e-mail clients and other network based tools on this Win7 VM I am going to stick with it for now, but I am interested in other people's thoughts and potentially their experiences with other A/V software besides Avast. Other than these somewhat painful VM issues Avast has done me no harm.

Cheers.

ps/ i-pads and other organical material on hold for now.

[EdP2]

Hi, I've noticed that some programs are very poor in detecting that a VM is using resources and assume that nothing is happening on the host and then ramp their resources to the max. One that was a particular issue for me was Acronis backup and this also suffered from having no way of reducing its priority to a background setting. Microsoft updates (if allowed to take place in the background), and the Microsoft Search Indexer also appear to be badly behaved.

Using Task Manager (show processes from all users) and sorting on 'I/O Other' often shows the apparent culprit, but this action also 'tells' Windows that something is going on and so the problem then often rapidly disappears.

I understand that one way of possibly permanently fixing this issue is to put your VM Guests on a separate SSD, and this will be my next main purchase! My partial fix at the moment is to set vmware-vmx.exe priority to HIGH, I'm not sure if this really works but it seems to help.

As an aside, I wonder if the possible fix for Windows 7 SP1, might help:

Can you add this line to your host's WS config file   (C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini) and reboot the   host, and see if it fixes the issue for you..

vmmon.disableHostParameters = "TRUE"

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on VMWare Workstation, and what this command does, could comment on this.

[0WayneH0]

I've noticed that some programs are very poor in detecting that a VM is  using resources and assume that nothing is happening on the host and  then ramp their resources to the max.

Yeah I am mindful of that; I have all unecessary services disabled on my hosts, so Window Search (which in my opinion is evil) is always disabled and also SuperFetch since it's trying to fill the host RAM full of data and I don't want that. I have, however, recently started using SuperFetch on my main guest VM and it seems to work OK.

I understand that one way of possibly permanently fixing this issue is to put your VM Guests on a separate SSD

What's the logic there? If I have all disk thrashing guff disabled on the host (in theory) and my main disk is RAID0, also with memory page trimming disabled in the guest (again to avoid unnecessary disk access) I would hope that the main disk is up to the task, but again I'm interested to know the theory behind it. I'm always looking for an easy performance boost.

My partial fix at the moment is to set vmware-vmx.exe priority to HIGH, I'm not sure if this really works but it seems to help.

This seems to something easy to try. Doesn't mess with Workstation's own VM prioritization?

As an aside, I wonder if the possible fix for Windows 7 SP1, might help:

Can  you add this line to your host's WS config file    (C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini) and reboot the    host, and see if it fixes the issue for you..

vmmon.disableHostParameters = "TRUE"

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable on VMWare Workstation, and what this command does, could comment on this.

Something also that I am interested in finding out more about. 🙂

Thanks for the response; much appreciated.

[EdP2]

What's the logic there? If I have all disk thrashing guff disabled on  the host (in theory) and my main disk is RAID0, also with memory page  trimming disabled in the guest (again to avoid unnecessary disk access) I  would hope that the main disk is up to the task, but again I'm  interested to know the theory behind it. I'm always looking for an easy  performance boost.

To be very honest, I don't know! If you search on 'SSD+Vmware' you will get posts/blogs such as this:

http://david-freund.com/tag/ssd/

I can only hazard a guess why it may have far reaching effects. Even internet trawling is always accompanied by i/o activity, and vms seem more prone to i/o binding than anything else. Badly written apps could well be missing a few 'process windows messages' in a host disk read/write area and your vm guest is stuffed if is on the same drive. (I'm assuming multi-core/multi disk do not have the same problem).

[0WayneH0]

OK I see where you and that article are coming from. I may be a little unique perhaps in my use case here. I do literally everything on VMs. My hosts are just skeleton operating systems (Win7 x64 on quad core, 8Gb, RAID0) with anti-virus, disk imaging, disk encryption, and VMware. To that end I don't actively use the hosts for doing anything other than running VMware, so nothing (in theory) should be competing with my VMs for disk access, unless its a problem with the host OS and/or those skeleton apps, with anti-virus being the main contender I suppose.

The reason my hosts machines are just skeleton systems is that I got completely sick of re-staging machines that died. Even restoring a full back-up image was a full day job (due to the amount of data that I normally have imaged** and also the fact I have to fully re-encrypt system disks after restoring an image) so now I have next to no investment in the hosts, and lots of investment in my VMs. If a hard disk dies I can be up and running as quickly as it takes to put VMware on a different machine and copy my latest VM backup to it.

** Maybe that problem in itself also a case for putting my host OS on a different volume to my data, but I'm stuck with single volume machines until I do something about it.

Anyway, again thanks for the response. It's always good to get someone else's take on something. I appreciate it.

[EdP2]

Thanks for your response. I've probably got 80% of my work on VMs rather than the 100%. However, even if I could move to 100% (I'd need much better OpenGL/DirectX graphics support in VMWare to do that), I'd still have the problems of backup.

How do you backup your VM's?