Poor VMWare Performance

kjacoby

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Jul 2011
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Good afternoon. Do any of you have any suggested VMWare settings for your software? I setup 2 VM's for all of my software. 1 for allen bradley software, and one for all my misc programs. I have a Brand new Dell M6800 fully loaded. Top of the line processor, 32gb ram, Win 7 Pro, SSD hard drive for OS, and a hybrid drive for the VM's. My VM's are both Win 7 Pro as well. I have them setup with 8gb memory, and 4 processors(1 processor, 4 core).

My programming software freezes up all the time. The vms are constantly bogged down. It takes over a minute to assembly an online edit in RS5000 sometimes.

Right now I have a corrupt VMX file on my Misc VM. IT will be having VMware remote in on Wednesday to see if they can find any issues. That will be my last chance, if they cant get it working, I am removing them. I have heard all of the praise for VM's on this forum, but I have had nothing but head aches from them. I like them, but the performance absolutely sucks! I have even had them bogged down for over 2 hours after a fresh reboot. I have no Antivirus software installed on them, and verified AV software doesn't scan the VM files.

Does any body have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Kenneth
 
Do you have a program called Dell protected workspace on the computer?
If you do, remove it.
I was getting very poor performance on a VM recently and it was the cause.
 
I use VMWare with almost exactly the same setup as you, and it runs like a train. Only difference I can see is that I give each VM two processor cores instead of four, but like you I give them 8GB of RAM each. I routinely run two at once and have one online with a PLC and the other doing AutoCAD drawings and checking emails, and unless both VM's are doing something very processor intensive (like publishing autoCAD drawings and downloading to a PLC simultaneously) they run great.

My host is a MacBook Pro, so I'm using VMWare Fusion rather than VMWare Workstation, but in all other respects my setup seems to be the same as yours. I'm with Mike on this one - check for BloatWare on the host. I've got nothing but praise for VMWare itself.
 
Check you hsot BIOs or UEFI and see if you have an option to enable IntelVT-x which will make the VM's perform much better with the hardware.

Remove any crapware you can from the host. (I normally wipe the host right out of the box or Purchase with no OS and install my own.)

Remove any crapware or windows services that are not needed in the VM. I normally make my own installer for VM's also and don't use the standard OS installer.

If you have any security in the VM such as AV or Firewall get rid of it. it's not really needed but if you must have AV make sure it's something lite. I use MS system center endpoint as it's based on MS Security essentials.
 
I use VMWare with almost exactly the same setup as you, and it runs like a train. Only difference I can see is that I give each VM two processor cores instead of four, but like you I give them 8GB of RAM each. I routinely run two at once and have one online with a PLC and the other doing AutoCAD drawings and checking emails, and unless both VM's are doing something very processor intensive (like publishing autoCAD drawings and downloading to a PLC simultaneously) they run great.

My host is a MacBook Pro, so I'm using VMWare Fusion rather than VMWare Workstation, but in all other respects my setup seems to be the same as yours. I'm with Mike on this one - check for BloatWare on the host. I've got nothing but praise for VMWare itself.

I run VMware on Windows PC's and on a Mac Book Pro. it runs much better on the Mac Book even though the windows machines have more memory and processor speed.
 
Since you have lots of memory to allocate to the guest you may want to disbale memory trimming because it's likely doing more hard than good. Don't have a laptop handy but from memory I think it is.

VM > Settings > Options > Advanced > Disable memory page trimming

Also if you can allocate all set disk space to the VM stic and disable dynamic it will help also.
 
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Are you running a 64 bit OS in both Host and Guest? if not that's a large performance booster.

Also another big one delete snapshots. Snapshot kill performance and the more you have the harder it is to track all the way back to the delta.

You never want more than 1 snapshot which is the auto snapshot if you make a change make a snapshot and keep it for a week or so to verify your change is good then delete them.

I would also disable background snapshots also.
 
Make sure your power adapter is the correct one. I know that this sounds crazy, but I have almost the same set up as you (Linux Distro for host and only have 24 gigs of RAM) but, if I turn computer on with it plugged into an old power adapter I get very crapy performance out of my computer. I mean click, go get a coffee and hope that program opens by the time I get back. When I look at system monitor,5 of the 8 cores are running at 100%. In order to fix, I unplug power adapter, and restart. The weird part is, after computer is up and running, I can plug the old adapter in and it has no effect on computer. Like I said, it sounds crazy, but I was pulling my hair out until I figured out what was causing computer to run slow....
 
I think you are going a bit overkill with your resource allocations for your VM's, they run fairly light compared to physical machines.

All my VM's are setup with 1 processor, 2 cores.

XP VM's set to use 1GB ram, Win7 VM's set to use 2GB. Only my Win7 AutoCAD VM I set higher to 8GB.

As mentioned previously a very important setting is to make sure Virtualisation or Intel VT-x/EPT is enabled in your BIOS.

Other than that the only other thing I would suggest is swapping out your hybrid drive for an SSD. You can pick up 500GB SSD's for $175ish and they will make a MASSIVE improvement.
 
This helped my Rockwell VM performance tremendously

MemTrimRate = "0"
mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"

Adding these settings to a virtual machine can reduce the I/O load on the hard disk, however these adjustments require additional memory on the host. Only add these settings if there is sufficient free memory on the host to accommodate all the memory allocated to the virtual machine, otherwise you may cause a memory starvation condition that can reduce performance of all the running virtual machines or possibly affect the host operating system. Use these settings with caution.

Open the .vmx file for the affected virtual machine while it is powered off. Add the following lines to the file using a text editor. For more information, see Editing the .vmx file of a VMware Workstation and VMware Player virtual machine (2057902)

Bob
 
Thank you all. I'll try to reply to most suggestions here.

Mike_RH, I went through and removed all Dell bloatware. I have not ran the VM's enough to notice any difference yet.



ASF, The reason i am currently at 4 processors, is as I noticed poor performance I started increasing the Processor Count. I may be able to eventually drop the count.

PBuckanan, IT has already enabled virtualization in the Bios. I just removed the bloatware. The VM's have most unneeded services disabled. Security and firewalls are disabled on the VM's. I just disabled the page trimming. I am running 64 bit on all three systems.(Host, 2 vm's.) Snapshot is disabled.

Robobob, I added these to the VMX files. Once i run the system some more I will have a better idea how its acting.


Thank you all for your help. I am hoping this will help. I will run the system for a few days, and update you on hows its running.

Thanks,
Kenneth
 
For Win 7 (or 10) start the task manager on BOTH the VM and the base OS.
Go to the Performance tab, and click the resource monitor button (You can exit task manager now).
Resource Monitor really helps me to locate things bogging down the system, and which system.
 
I don't know what exact processor you have is, but let's assume it has 4 cores that can be exposed to the VM software.
Configuring each VM to also have 4vCPU means that when the VM is looking for processor time from the host hardware, it needs to wait until all 4 cores are available to work on. 2 VMs, both looking for processor time and both wanting to use 4 cores, will setup a really nasty bout of resource contention basically all the time.
Even running just one of the VMs will still fight w/ the host OS for CPU time.
 
Also, assuming you are running VMware workstation, Try changing the process scheduling for your VMs. You can tell the VMs to run as 'high' while input is grabbed, and 'low' when input isn't, and that should noticeably speed up your user experience.
 

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