Loudspeaker icon greyed out and VMWare Fusion freezing

[rhpk]

Hi, I'm having a seemingly issue with VMWare Fusion Professional Version 11.5.3 (15870345) and Catalina 10.15.3 (19D76) on a Macbook Pro 16.

Basically, from time to time, my VMs freeze with the cursor put in waiting mode. I noticed that, whenever this happens, the loudspeaker icon becomes grey and then intermittently start to flash from white to grey until, after 10 seconds or so it becomes white again and everything start working again normally. Sometimes, other apps using sound freeze as well.

I googled the issue but nothing came out. Anyone else experiencing this issue?

Thanks.

C.

[ColoradoMarmot]

The sound may be a symptom, not a cause.  One cause might be the VM starving the host for cycles.  What's the guest and host CPU's?

The rule of thumb is that no guest should have more than N-1 cores assigned, where N is the physical (not virtual/hyperthreaded) in the host machine.