Ray_CJ's Posts

Jack, In my case, Ethernet performance was only part of the equation.  Even at that, after dozens of attempts while working with the VMWare engineer, we could only somewhat improve Ethernet performance to where it averaged about 60% that of a dedicated host.  I too have an Intel dedicated Ethernet card with 4 ports and we also enabled Jumbo frames. For many things, a VM solution is the only way to go.   Backups, image portability etc, is critical in some environments.  In my case for "personal computing needs", VM solutions are not adequate.   I was a user of Oracle VirtualBox for nearly 10 years and faced the same issues.  I decided to try VMWare and discovered the grass was not greener on the other side of the fence. As a semi-retired engineering consultant, I run CAD/CAM programs that do finite element analysis.  Even if I dedicated all the system resources to a single VM, any given simulation would run at least 50% slower under a VM environment.  As a hobby, I do audio and video processing.   The software simulation of OpenGL sets the performance of a modern video card back a couple decades. USB 3.0 simply does not work -so, it's not even possible to use a microphone DAC to do live recording. Companies who purchase VMWare certified hardware solutions will get the most benefit from a VMWare solution.  VMWare Desktop Workstation is sold as a general platform package with minimal hardware restrictions.  In my case, I have an AMD 3950 with a high-end MOBO and decent graphics card.  VMWare installed properly and indeed provided virtualization capabilities; however, each virtual machine was little more than a glorified e-machine that had lots of hiccups, delays and glitches.  Once again, VMs are great for commercial web-server and database purposes.  -For use as a high-end workstation, VMs are not the right tool.   Regards Ray  

Jack, The issues with degraded Ethernet and USB 3.0 speeds will always exist until PC hardware/architecture fundamentally changes.  Because of the way virtualization works, that data needs to be processed by the CPU, then delivered to/from the VMs.   There's no CPU fast enough to do that and still maintain proper timing of all the other work it needs to do.  About 6 months after I reported the problem, an engineer from VMWare called and confirmed there is no solution in-sight to Video, Ethernet and USB data in real-time.   I eventually gave-up on VMWare and VMs in-general.  It's a cool idea that works well primarily for web-server and database applications but, does not work well for individual users that want dedicated desktop power-houses.  In my case, CAD/CAM software and video processing applications suffered tremendously.   Ray

Folks, FYI:  The engineering department addressed the ticket I had open for this and several other performance issues.  After a lot of trouble-shooting on the phone, there are no solutions.  Also, the NIC and USB 3.0 performance issues are known problems that will apparently be addressed sometime in the future.  For now, only USB 2.0 is reliable for real-time data such as voice or video.  Variable network speeds will happen no matter what host OS (Windows or Linux) is used.  Certain functions of DirectX are not implemented in the VMGraphics Driver.   And so it shall be! When it comes to virtual machines and device drivers (such as NICs, Video Cards, USB etc) there will always be a performance loss.  It's just a bit more than I expected.   After a lot of testing on the same hardware (direct comparison with and without VMWare) I'm seeing typical performance differences of 10 to 30% across the board. There are certain benefits to using VMs that offset the performance hits so, consider that when deciding to use VMs.  In my particular case, I've decided to convert my machine back to a Win 10 stand-alone system for all primary purposes (CAD/CAM, Video and Photo Editing) and only use VMs for scratchpad and test environments. Regards Ray  

  Hi Wila...  Just so you know, I'm not going to lose sleep over this problem.  It's an issue of curiosity more than anything else.   At this juncture, I'm very curious if other people are having the same issue.  That will tell me if this can be solved or not. I don't think the problem is related to CPU resources or disk speed.  The disks are 2TB, NVME drives operating at about 64Gbps.  Also, the same test was conducted on the same machine, using a CentOS guest VM.   CentOS guest VM Ethernet operates at 90-95% of rated line speed.  The Centos guest VM environment is setup identically to the Win 10 guest.  It's loaded on the same host, same NVME drives etc.  If all my programs were available on Linux, I would never have noticed this problem. Tests were also performed with 2 temporary Win 10 Guest VMs.  One with Win 10 Home and the other Win 10 Pro.  These were brand new and fresh with minimal installation options.  The same problem exists on them.   It seems that VMware Workstation has 2 fundamental issues with guests.  1) Ethernet performance is only about 50% of what the host can get.  2) For both Linux and Windows, only USB 2.0 can be used if audio is passed over the data path.  If USB 3 is used, the audio gets terribly distorted.  I guess there is a 3rd issue too.  Everyone knows that the SVGA driver introduces about a 40% performance hit in graphic card processing.  These issues seem to be the fundamental weakness of VM technology.  It's possible that tweaking various interrupt levels or tweaking various RX/TX buffer parameters in the various drivers might improve the situation.  I'm not ambitious enough to go down that path. BTW:  I spent a great many years writing in Assembly language and wrote many device drivers (over 35 years ago when pSoS and VxWorks were the prevailing RTOS's).  I can certainly understand the difficulties associated with VM technology.  If I can find an easy solution, great.  Otherwise, I'm happy to let some young hot-shot programmer figure-out what is causing these problems  :+).   I hope VMware folks are reading this and hope they are inspired to investigate. Ray    

Thank you Wila...   Here's an update.   The configuration was changed from "e1000e" to "vmxnet3".  Full testing has not been done but basically, performance seems to be about the same.   Win 10 under VMware is not capable of operating Ethernet at 1Gbps.  The best it will (sometimes) do is 700Mbps.  It usually operates between 300-600Mbps. I suspect this issue has no solution right now.  My system has been this way since it was established in early December.  This setup is used for personal purposes. I did not notice the degraded speeds until some very large backup files were taking a VERY long time to transfer to NAS.  On the host, I occasionally backup the VMs to Amazon S3 and it takes only a few hours with 1Gig Internet service.   Some smaller local backups from the guest to NAS were taking longer to complete.   rsync is used in both cases.   I wasted much time falsely debugging the NAS as I assumed the ZFS NFS disks were running slow for some reason.     Do you happen to know if all VMware solutions have this problem?  If I switch from Workstation to Vsphere with Esxi, will that have the same problem?  Thanks Ray  (PS:  I didn't use notepad to edit the file since I've been using "vi" ever since it replaced "ed") LOL...   PS: PS:  I also created another VM and used TCP Optimizer ( SpeedGuide.net :: TCP Optimizer / Downloads )  This increased speeds a tiny bit but not much -maybe 5%.   

Hi Wila and All Others...  Happy New Year   Can you tell me how to install the vmxnet3 virtual adapter in the guest?  The documentation I found is very out of date and I was not successful at installing it. BTW:  The guest is setup with a VMnet0 bridged connection that points to a dedicated (physical) Intel NIC.  It also has the complete and latest VMware Tools package installed.  The Guest network connection's Ethernet adapter device is labeled as Intel(R) 82574L Gigabit Network Connection and the corresponding device driver is provided by Microsoft (dated 2018).  I would like to see if this vmxnet3 adapter works any better than the default adapter.   Additional Notes If You Wish To Keep Reading:  The PC I'm using is very robust and is not heavily utilized.  (AMD 3900 12/24 core, 128GB RAM, NVME Drives etc).  I have done a lot more testing and gave the host and guest each 64GB RAM and 12 cores.  All other applications and services were turned off.   Still, the guest Ethernet transfer rates are -well... terrible.  The host always gets full line rate in both upload and download (usually 950Mbps to 1.1 Gbps).  The guest usually gets only 50-70% of rated speed and is very asymmetric.  For example sometimes send-rate is 20% line rate and receive-rate is 40% and a moment later the results will show send-rate of 80% and receive-rate of only 5%.   I am testing in 3 ways using A) a file transfer benchmark package, B) real-time statistics from a NAS device,  C) Internet speed test. I have also verified the test using CentOS (v8) as a guest on the same host platform.  The CentOS results show only 2-5% degraded performance -which seems fantastic. Finally, there are 4 NICs in this computer and the host NIC and guest NICs have all been interchanged while repeating the tests.  It makes no difference what NICs are being used. Sorry for the long post... Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.   PS:  One final note.  Tests were performed with Bridge connection to host IP and also NAT.  Results are the same. Ray    

Thank you.  I was not aware of this support package.  It's availability negates many of the things I previously mentioned; specifically, the upgrade cost of about $150 (USD) is well worth it.  Currently, I have a Support Request open from the 30 day coverage that was included in the package.  It will soon expire if hasn't already.  I encountered a couple more issues that would be nice to resolve.  If those become too difficult to solve myself, I will indeed get the extended support package.     Thanks for letting me know about this.   Ray  

  The real problem, is that a virtual machine running under a Type 2 hypervisor (aka Workstation) is inherently tied to the hardware it runs on.  Since Workstation is commercial software (available free or to anyone with $199 to spend) it will be used on any-and-all kinds of hardware.  Since there are so many kinds of PCs and since common operating systems (Windows, Linux etc) are constantly evolving, there is no way VMware will ever make it work in all cases.  There will always be more questions than answers. In the "industrial" use cases, VMware products are only guaranteed/supported if used on approved hardware platforms.  In that kind of environment, VMware stands a chance of making their product work well. So far, VM Workstation is better than other VM solutions I've tried.  I don't put too much stress on the product and I understand it's limitations.   I only use VMs because I'm sick/tired of how OS's and commercial software eventually devolve into the back hole of "Software Entropy".   I like being able to make copies of a well working system.  This has helped me many times and is worth the $199 and frustration that goes along with it. But yeah, if VMware is going to make a "lightweight" product that people pay for, they should at least provide some paid (albeit "lightweight") support.   Ray  

  An individual license for VMware Workstation retails for about $199 (USD).  It is frequently used by inexperienced users who tend to need a lot of support.  It's my observation that many of those users lack the basic technical skills needed to use a moderately sophisticated program like this.  As such, to break even, VMware would need to charge a LOT of money for a maintenance program because the labor cost would be astronomical.   Not many people are going to pay $600/year for a $200 program. If you were a large business with hundreds (or thousands) of VMware deployments and if you were paying more than 6 figures a year for annual maintenance contracts, you could probably get them to throw-in dedicated support for Workstation for free.   Anything short of that, and you'll have to figure things out for yourself and surf these user-driven forums.  This is how most companies operate now. I have been assisted by some good volunteers here -and my thanks goes out to them.  Relying on the good nature of volunteers is not a good plan though.  If I could have 1 wish, it would be for VMware to provide 1 paid and qualified service technician read this forum once a week and provide feedback on the technical problems that warrant attention.      Ray    

I am not familiar with shared VMs because I'm only familiar with Workstation since version 16.  Versions 16 does not support shared VMs. Maybe this will help.  If the device that remembers the credentials is a Windows OS, open the "Credential Manager" and see if the login information is stored there.   If so, you can delete that credential entry if you have administrator rights. Regards Ray  

I don't know how to make VMware forget the login name and password.  I am curious about this myself.   If you are concerned about security, you can change the login information to false information. First, enable autologin. Next, select "Change User..."     ​Then set the User Name to some non-sense name and remove the password.     After you hit OK, go back to the Settings-Autologin option and press Disable. It still seems to remember the User name but at least, it is a bad name and NULL password so, you have security.   Ray    

Was this working properly in the past or, is this a new setup that is not working as you expect? Are the Guest Tools installed in the guest OS's? What are the technical details of your setup such as hardware platform, CPU, RAM Host OS and Guest OS?    

  LOL...  "Down here in the Netherlands"   You are way, way farther North than I am... 1)  What I have noticed, is that when someone replies to a post, it moves to the top of the list -and therefore becomes easier to see. 2)  I posted a response to the user's question and noticed that the response did not get bumped to the top.  As a matter of fact, unless I click the link to that original post, I cannot find it anywhere in this forum.  So... If the OP does not have notifications turned on, I assumed they will not see the response.   Given this, I cross-posted my reply to the OPs second thread hoping they will see it. Anyhow, I suspect the OP is not properly establishing the NAT network in the Network Editor -and I also think they are not properly assigning the NAT Network to the VM's Network Adapter settings. Anyhow, I'm very new to VMware and am just trying to learn more about it...  I read people's problems, try to duplicate the issue (or theorize how to duplicate it) and then try to solve it.    Ray  

I posted a reply to the thread link posted in the 1st message.   That thread does not seem to show-up anywhere in this forum and does not bump to the top after posting to it.  It's possible the OP won't see the replies.  If that thread can be moved (concatenated) to this one, that would be ideal. The problem they are experiencing appears to be solvable. Ray

First question(s)... Was this running prior to upgrading to Workstation 16, and if so, what version was being used? Has the version of Ubuntu changed?   With simple NAT interface, the host will only be able to reach the guest if the host has a route to the NAT'd subnet.   Do a "netstat -r" command in the host. See example below.  In the purple/pink area, if you don't see a destination to your NAT subnet, that answers why your host can't reach the guest.   If we determine this is the fundamental reason for the disconnect, we can later try to find-out why that route is not getting installed in your host routing table.  If the route exists and points to the proper pseudo-interface, then we must debug why the packets aren't getting there.     Regards Ray C  

The posted link shows a banner page indicating the message is not available. Also, if the product was paid-for and registered, VMware provides 30 days of direct technical support.  You can create a ticket by logging into your VMware account.   Ray