what is the best VMWare Workstation 12+ and SSD (mis)configuration?

[LongTimeVMUser]

As a VMWare paid user i have wrote to VMWare CS but they refused to answer my simple (?) question (they asked me to post to communities, so here i am)

this is the configuration

host:

• windows 10 pro x64 up to date (installed from scratch)
• cpu: amd athlon 5150 radeon r3 1.6gb
• ram 16gb
• disk: SSD
• all drivers up to date
• vmw player lastest windows version

guest:

• windows 7 pro up to date (installed from scratch)
• cpu: vmware
• ram: 8 gb
• disk: scsi + single file - fixed
• installed vmtools lastest version
• all drivers up to date

issue:

• the host os works great. guest vm is slow.
• disk performance on guest is 10mb/s but 100mb/s on host

tests:

• 3d acceleration enabled/disabled,
• with 4 cores: run regular. with 1 core it gets worst.

my doubts are:

1. i am not sure if running the vm from this ssd is a good idea,
2. or if vmtools guest drivers are working correctly
3. or if guest installation from scratch must be done in some particular way to use ssd
4. or if custom config must be done to use ssd (sata? ide? scsi?)
5. or if there is a windows version that must be used as guest to take advantage of ssd

btw:

• the same configuration, running virtualbox runs much better/faster (but suddenly host hangs up with a blue screen, the reason i need to change to vmware).

any ideas? thank you

ps: documentation outthere is refered to vmware workstation v7 (older) or esx

[louyo]

This comes up a lot and is hard to answer. Here is my .02

1. Put your virtual machines on a separate hard drive from the OS. I use (hardware) striped RAID.

2. Make sure your AV software is not examining your files as VMware opens them. Remove it for testing.

3. Do not assign any more processors or cores than the applications. Same thing for RAM.

4. Use tools like process monitor to see what is eating up disk and processor resources.

You will lose some disk speed to the overhead of VMWare itself, I think you will get better performance if you let it limit file sizes to 2GB.

I run on a Linux host but get these disk speeds on the VM drives, using hdparm:

Host system reading from the same striped RAID 7200 RPM drives where I run my VM's: 400MB/sec

Guest running on that same striped drive:   300MB/sec

There was 1 other VM running at the same time.

(My host OS is on an SSD)

Lou

[LongTimeVMUser]

thank you for sharing your personal experience, but this does not answer my question at all.

[wila]

Hi,

Personally I thought that louyo's answer was pretty much on the mark.

As you only have 4 cores in your host, my suggestion for your VM is to drop to 2 cores so that you leave some CPU free for your host without straining the CPU scheduler. It is the host that does the actual writes to disk after all.

To go over your specific points.

1. Running a VM from an SSD should be fine, there are no issues with that. As mentioned before if you can spread your IO over multiple spindles then you can improve your performance, but of course that only counts if the other disk is as fast as the current one.

2. Disk writing performance has nothing to do with correct installation of VMware Tools unless you would want to go for a paravirtual driver that is meant for vSphere (pvscsi). I recommend to NOT do that.

3. No

4. No, use defaults

5. No, it is the host OS that does the actual writes.

Did you check that your host antivirus has excluded the vmdk files?

Also as Louyo mentioned, using split disks is MUCH preferred over the single file disk format.

Also what antivirus are you running? There's a few antivirus products out there (AVG/Avast/BitDefender 2017) that have serious performance issues and need some additional tweaks.

Do you have snapshots open? If so then you can also expect reduced performance because of that.

--

Wil