Sluggish mouse, overall slowness on Windows 10 guest

[rfurtado]

Hi there,

I was a happy Parallels users.  Now I have to use VMware Fusion for work. Version 11.5.0 (14634996) and it's been painful.

I'm hopeful a change in the configuration will correct these sluggish issues.

Here are the details:
Host: macOS Catalina 10.15.1

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MacBook Pro 13-inch, Early 2015

Processor: 2.7 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5

Memory: 8 GB 1867 Mhz DDR3

Graphics: Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 MB

Storage: 251 GB Flash storage - 48.87 GB available

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Virtual machine size: 64.6 GB

Processors: 2 processor cores

Memory: 2048 MB (6192 MB remaining for my Mac)

Please let me know if I missed any piece of important information. I really appreciate if anyone has some advice for me to improve the performance.

[ColoradoMarmot]

So some questions:

- Did you convert the VM from parallels or create a new one from scratch? (have to make sure to remove all the parallels drivers before opening in Fusion, and to install Fusion tools)

- How long ago did you upgrade to Catalina? (it may still be indexing)

- What else is running on the machine?  The rule of thumb is to only allocate N-1 physical cores to a guest (which yes, is problematic on a 2-core machine) to avoid starving the host for cycles

- Do you have antivirus in the guest?  If so, make sure you disable scans

- Disable system restore in the guest if it's Windows

[rfurtado]

Thanks dlhotka, here are my answers:

- Did you convert the VM from parallels or create a new one from scratch? No. I used Parallels in another computer

- How long ago did you upgrade to Catalina?  It's been slow even before Catalina . I upgraded to Catalina the day it became available.

- What else is running on the machine? In the guest, MS Project. In the Host, MS Office, Slack, Safari...

- Do you have antivirus in the guest?  Per company policy, I cannot do that.

- Disable system restore in the guest if it's Windows. I haven't tried this. Will do it now. Thanks

-- update --

I disabled the system restore, but unfortunately the slowness didn't go away.

[ColoradoMarmot]

So it may very well be the antivirus.

We (I work in cyber security) moved away from scheduled scans a long time ago because they add little value and cause many problems - live protection is just as effective and a lot less invasive, so it may be worth talking with your IT folks about that.  In this day and age moving to an EDR solution with behavior based detection is far superior to signature based detection as well, and that definitely doesn't need scheduled scans.

What happens is that because VM's aren't used often, and are rarely left running over night, the schedule scans trigger as soon as the VM boots/resumes.

The only other thought is that the guest/host resource relationship is off.  Best practice is no more than N-1 physical cores allocated to any individual guest and N-4GB in aggregate ram across all guests.