3

My dual-boot laptop (Windows 8.1 + Ubuntu 14.04) I installed, on both Windows and Ubuntu, VMware Player 7.0.0.

In other words:

  • Same exact hardware (16GB RAM!)
  • Same VMware Player version (7.0.0)
  • Same exact VM (accessible through a shared NTFS mount)

On the Windows VMPlayer, the VM is snappy, responsive and performs very well. On the Ubuntu VMPlayer, same exact VM is painfully slow, unresponsive, sometimes freezes for 30 seconds or more.

Ubuntu 14.0.4 already impressed me as an OS that is slower than Ubuntu 10.0.4, but I am having hard time to believe that this is the reason for VMPlayer's abysmal performance.

Is there a way to find out what causes this sluggishness? i.e. some log files or other tuning data?

Alternatively, if you have experienced this before and you know how to fix this, I would be grateful for any tip that will make my VMPlayer 7.0.0 usable under Ubuntu, as I much prefer the Ubuntu environment over Windows.

Not So Sharp
  • 133
  • 1
  • 4
  • Do you have a video driver installed in Ubuntu that supports 3D Acceleration for virtualization? Hardware details like your video card model would be useful. – Matthew Read Jan 16 '15 at 19:01
  • 1
    It could be the fact that it's stored on an NTFS partition - but that's doubtful. If you're curious, try making a copy of the VM somewhere on the Ubuntu partition and pointing VMware to that one. – RPiAwesomeness Jan 16 '15 at 19:05
  • 1
    @RPi_Awesomeness It appears that your theory about NTFS is right on target. I made a copy of the VM on the Ubuntu partition and the difference in performance is astounding. I knew that, for Linux, ext4 is better than NTFS but I didn't realize that VMware Player relies on this to the extent of making NTFS unusable. Any idea how to overcome this? (BTW, you can post your comment as answer so that I can accept it) – Not So Sharp Jan 16 '15 at 20:37
  • 1
    @NotSoSharp I honestly have no clue. Are you hibernating Windows 7 when you switch to Ubuntu, or full shutting down? – RPiAwesomeness Jan 18 '15 at 00:37
  • 1
    @RPi_Awesomeness Of course I disabled Windows Hibernating, it is not possible to access it from Ubuntu otherwise. – Not So Sharp Jan 18 '15 at 22:33
  • @NotSoSharp Yeah, just making sure. – RPiAwesomeness Jan 19 '15 at 13:39

2 Answers2

2

Strangely enough, this issue was resolved by simply running the VM with the VM stored on an Ubuntu/EXT partition, as I suggested in the comments.

It could be the fact that it's stored on an NTFS partition - but that's doubtful. If you're curious, try making a copy of the VM somewhere on the Ubuntu partition and pointing VMware to that one.

Community
  • 1
RPiAwesomeness
  • 9,783
  • Unfortunately that also means that I will give up Ubuntu as my main platform. I wouldn't mind making the partition that contains the VMware VMs ext4 instead of NTFS, but Windows does not have a driver that can access ext4 R/W reliably, whereas Linux has no problem mounting NTFS R/W. – Not So Sharp Jan 18 '15 at 22:36
  • @NotSoSharp That's too bad. Have you considered trying Virtualbox (by Oracle I believe,) and running the VM stored on the NTFS partition in Virtualbox? Also, try adding mainMem.useNamedFile="FALSE" to your VM's configuration file (should have the extension .vmx. This will disable paging files and hopefully improve performance. Source – RPiAwesomeness Jan 19 '15 at 13:45
0

12.04 and 16.04 so presumably also 14.04 are definitely slower than 10.04 unless you happen to have new hardware which does not mind the extra churn going on in newer versions. As far as I can tell, since 12.04 some churnware such as tumblerd has been losing its configuration option to switch it off if you don't want a cpu core to be fully busy doing that. Like we'd all want to buy quadcore eventually if enough things are broken without it. Therefore your vmware player, if it has an option to allow more than one core to be used by the vm, is increasingly likely to need it with newer operating systems.

mephisto
  • 1