All Workstation 2023 Tech Preview Ideas posts

Re: Trim/Unmap support on GuestOS using FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE on HostOS (Thick provisioned vmdk)

LevaEng — Tue, 26 Sep 2023 09:44:05 GMT

It is impossible for the host machine to know which data in the guest disk it is actually used and which is not
For a full explanation on why see my answer in the other thread

While it is true that the Trim command (that is a sata command) is mostly associated with ssd it also true that the SCSI variant UnMap (that is the same thing) exist for this exact purpose of virtualisation and disk-provisioning

Re: The ability to choose all available priority for input grabbed/ungrabbed

jen2 — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:17:55 GMT

+1 this could be useful in some cases

Re: The ability to choose all available priority for input grabbed/ungrabbed

sohosynergy — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 02:53:14 GMT

Scrumbrues, let me test grabbing/ungrabbing this weekend and I'll post back!

Re: Trim/Unmap support on GuestOS using FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE on HostOS (Thick provisioned vmdk)

kasper — Sat, 16 Sep 2023 18:27:06 GMT

My preference would be a Guest should NOT have trim support. The idea behind virtualization is to 'hide' the underlying physical hardware. I would step back and look how I could support this on the host machine and disks.

Re: The ability to choose all available priority for input grabbed/ungrabbed

Scumbrues — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 19:24:38 GMT

We used to do this with VirtualBox, but once we moved to VMWare it wont work, as grabbing/ungrabbing the VM will change the priority to the option is set in the settings.

We arr running at least 10 VMs simultaneously, and we really need to set different priorities for our needs

Re: The ability to choose all available priority for input grabbed/ungrabbed

sohosynergy — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 21:17:38 GMT

You can create a shorcut and a batch file to load the virtual machine with different priorities AND also in said shortcut choose to run the vm as a different user. While it's a workaround at least until it's formally implemented that may help you.

Re: Stability and performance

cynar — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 09:31:50 GMT

Repairing the effectively unusable keyboard when not in CPL0 would be very helpful.

I would actually purchase another license to upgrade to a confirmed fixed version of VMware Workstation.

Context: When running VMware Workstation on top of the Microsoft Windows virtualization interface, to make it compatible with

Windows Sandbox
Hyper-V
WSL2
... and probably some more technologies where Microsoft have built on top of their virtualization stack

the keyboard in a VMware Workstation virtual machine gets any of

phantom key repeats (cursor keys are very popular)
seconds of delay until a key _registers_

... unless the user wiggles the (Bluetooth) mouse while typing on the (USB) keyboard, because the mouse apparently triggers some kind of acceleration / interrupt handling that makes the keyboard work fine.

This is not a problem of the virtual machine - everything works perfectly fine when that runs at CPL0 / VMware bare metal virtualization mode.

The ability to choose all available priority for input grabbed/ungrabbed

Scumbrues — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 04:47:09 GMT

Currently the only available options are (normal, high) for grabbed and (normal,low) for ungrabbed.

It would be very useful if you we can choose all possible priority for grabbed and ungrabbed:

idle: 4
below normal: 6
normal: 8
above normal: 10
high priority: 13
real time: 24

Re: Stability and performance

kasper — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 16:38:49 GMT

I would add USB4 to the list. This is a shot in the dark as I have not tried the 2023 preview.

Stability and performance

norbert-wnuk — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 19:49:18 GMT

I would like to propose a few of long-time existing glitches and performance limitations (that affects hundreds of my coworkers and are quite frequently mentioned on this forum as well).

- Manual tweaking of power throttling (in Windows) and P cores affinity (VMX) to avoid freezes, that reduces performance of the VM since 1/3 of the cores cannot be effectively activated (E cores on Intell 12/13th generation processors).

- Mysterious random GUI/Xorg freezes that forces to suspend and / or restart VMs with certain 5.15/5.19 Linux kernels for supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS releases (at least this seems to be gone in 6.2 kernel).

- Limited performance of NVME disks, that after tuning can reach only <75% (Ubuntu 22.04 6.2 HWE) of raw host performance (5.x kernels are worse). Additionally, NVME controller is affected by strange I/O timeouts on certain workloads / configurations (23H1 beta seems to be reducing number of timeouts but not eliminating). Finally, in my case SCSI is not a fallback since performance is significantly worse, reaching ~30% of raw host performance (especially terrible latency).

- Limited performance of SVGA3D driver, especially now when GPU Partitioning becoming a thing in Hyper-V for standard GPUs.

Hadware decoder (vp9 if not av1)

jen2 — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 09:59:57 GMT

Playing videos is almost a task that performed by everyone these days. Withou a video decoder it will use lots of CPU cycles to play videos inside a VM. Enabling video decoder will free lots of CPU cycles for other work. Please check this post https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Pro/When-does-vmware-pro-support-dx12/m-p/2981069#M182267

VMware Workstation Pro Korean Language Support

JasonBae — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 01:55:47 GMT

Hi, I have a something question.

Have you any plan for korean language support?
many koreans people wants korean language support.

If possible, can Korean language be supported in the next version (VMware Workstation Pro 18)?

Security Patches! (not updates)

jen2 — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 05:04:54 GMT

I would like to see security patches for small components for both VMWare workstation and tools, for OpenSSL, zlib ... , that can be released separately and faster than the regular updates.

The installer is huge, and almost quarterly updated, where are sometimes new releases for some components with security fixes.

For example, zlib library is about 100 kb and it was outdated with a security vulnerability. a small security patch of 100kb will fix the issue with no need to full installation

It would be nice if VMWare release security patches immediately for all its apps, so that these component are patched immediately and reduce the risk for breaches.

Each security patch will have a version and will be always included in new updates, and it can be seen in the about version.

I am sure there are too may paranoid users, like myself, and they will happy to see this feature.

What I would like most to be patch immediately is OpenSSL

Re: Few feature requests for the future version

jlymath — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 00:48:45 GMT

Disregard, responded on the wrong product

Re: Few feature requests for the future version

yurikus — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 18:59:32 GMT

> (3) Not sure if this is already supported - Headless guest?
There's an option - keep vms running when WS window closes, combined with autostart VMs, port forwarding and shared folders you got a proper docker host

> (4) More customizable vmnet settings. i.e. routing settings, DHCP options , etc.

Virtual Network Editor and config files in the ProgramData/vmware dir

Re: Make all logs optional!

yurikus — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 18:57:06 GMT

Re: Move files from the Temp folder instead of copying them in case of drag and drop files to VM

yurikus — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 18:56:52 GMT

+1
or delete on success

Re: Bigger working screen

yurikus — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 18:54:55 GMT

Trim/Unmap support on GuestOS using FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE on HostOS (Thick provisioned vmdk)

LevaEng — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 14:00:44 GMT

Hi

I'm spinning multiple VMs on top of a ZFS filesystem dataset

Each VM has its disk fully allocated (Thick Provisioned), but given that ZFS support native compression (and deduplication of data too) the actual on-disk-size of each vmdk file is only as big as the written data (or even 1 / N with dedup)
Generally speaking this is what should happen on any modern FileSystem than support sparse-file / Fallocate/ Hole-Punching
(This setup is better than sparse vmdk because it have superior performance generally and extra far better storage efficiency if combined with ZFS native compression and on-line data deduplication )

This work good and well while the GuestOS write data, but then when such data is deleted it is never freed-up on the Host side because the HostOS can never know (if not hinted) that this range of the vmdk file has been "released" by the upper GuestOS

For this, at least on linux based OSes there is the fallocate( FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE | FALLOC_FL_KEEP_SIZE ) that can "punch hole" in the file and free the not used space (logical size of the file stay the same but physical on-disk size shrink as needed)

But when configuring a VM on Workstation 17 with:
- Thick Provisioned Disk (single file)
- I/O controller : LSI Logic SAS
- Disk Type : NVMe

The GuestOS (Windows11) report that the disk do not have Trim support
But Trim support in this case should be supported and then converted in a fallocate call on the vmdk file by the HyperVisor (VMWare Workstation)

How can I can enable this behaviour? I already tried adding to the .vmx configuration file:
- nvme0:0.virtualSSD = "TRUE"
- disk.scsiUnmapAllowed = "TRUE"

But GuestOS is still reporting no Trim support

Thanks,
Luca

Also posted here

Nested hypervisor support under Windows Hypervisor Platform

ralish — Thu, 27 Jul 2023 03:59:08 GMT

Are there any plans to supported nested virtualisation under Windows Hypervisor Platform?

If Hyper-V is installed, or any of several security features are enabled on the host OS (Virtualisation Based Security), then the Windows Hypervisor Platform is used instead of VMware's native hypervisor. This breaks support for VMs which required nested virtualisation (e.g. ESXi guests, Windows guests that themselves have VBS enabled). The underlying support appears to be present in the Windows Hypervisor Platform given nested virtualisation can be used on VMs directly created using Hyper-V, but VMware Workstation does not have any awareness of it.

Previously discussed on these topics but have not received any comment from VMware: