My VM becomes sluggish after a few hours (~12 hours or so) of being idle, there is no impact on the host, just the guest. The guest OS becomes sluggish.
It has lots of RAM, runs on RAID 0, quad core i5 750, everything is defragmented, but the only way I found to keep its responsiveness optimal is to shutdown (dumps the memory) and the start; a restart of the guest OS doesn't dump the memory so I need to be able to do a stop of the VM, and then a start.
Coming from Hyper-V I had to learn VMware and after a few months of fine tunning it I'm quite impressed with how configurable VMware is. This is the only small issue I haven't been able to fix, has anyone encountered this?
[EDIT]
Thanks for pointing out those features Helvik, here are my current settings.
Advanced Default/Default
- Gather debugging information: None
- Disable memory page trimming: Unchecked
- Log virtual machine progress periodically: Unchecked
- Enable template mode: Unchecked
Replay section Debugging enabled
- Maximum disk: Unlimited
- Save the last: Unlimited
- Snapshot frequency: Never
- Enable VAssert (experimental): Unchecked
- Enable Visual Studio debugger (experimental): Checked
I have no snapshots. It does have Visual Studio installed. I see 3 log files were created earlier today (248 KB each). Would you recommended I change some settings?
[2nd EDIT]
Thanks, I have now disabled the Visual Studio debugging feature.
Host
- OS: Windows 7 x64
- Processor: Intel Core i5 750 (quad core, no hyperthreading)
- Mem: 4 GB
- Drives: 4x500 GB in RAID 0
- 1 DVD drive
Guest
- OS: Windows 2008 R2
- Processor: 1 CPU
- Mem: 2 GB
- Drives: 1 Drive 18/140 GB used, full disk space is not pre-allocated
- 1 DVD drive
- 1 floppy drive
- USB controller is present, nothing is using USB on the guest, and only keyboard and mouse are using USB on the host.
So far the things I have done are:
Disable Visual Studio debugging
The DVD drive on the guest was mapped to a DVD drive letter that didn't exist anymore on the host, I now changed it to the correct drive letter.
I have changed this setting from 'some' to 'most' in VMware Workstation's: Preferences>Memory>Allow most virtual machine memory to be swapped. When it was set to 'some', I could see from the task manager on the host, that the VM was using the whole 2 GB it's allowed to use, although Task Manager on the guest showed it was using only 500 MB. Now with this setting set to 'most' Task Manager on the guest shows the VM uses about 500 MB of its 2 GB of RAM, and Task Manager on the guest also matches that.
I will let it run for a good 12 hours and then check the VM's responsiveness.