7.1 Less Stable Than 7.0 ?

[PnwGuy]

Is it just me or are others experiencing more stability problems under 7.1?

I literally would run 7.0 on my Windows 7 64 bit host for a week or more without a single problem or needing to close Workstation, reboot the host, or reboot (or reset) a guest VM. It was amazingly stable.

With 7.1 however, I rarely make it half a day without some fatal, or extremely annoying, problem related to Workstation. Some examples:

- I've had all of Workstation 7.1 just spontaneously close (likely crash). Poof. Gone. Taking my open VM and the work there with it.

- With 8 GB of RAM on the host I used to be able to run two VMs at once (each using 2GB), but under 7.1 it's suicide. The 2nd VM will take many minutes just to open and neither is usable after that requiring I shut Workstation down completely to recover. And I have swapping turned off in Workstation and ample max RAM allocated so it's not a swapping issue.

- My XP VM's are now experiencing random "freezes" for several seconds at a time. The host CPU (a quad core i7) is pegged at 100% while this is happening with VMware being the culprit. There's another thread on this and others are having this problem.

- I've had numerous video/refresh problems in my VMs with screens not refreshing properly--i.e. empty windows, etc.

- I've had some really weird behavior with the mouse and/or keyboard being jerky and/or unresponsive at times that requires rebooting to fix.

- I've had issues doing large file copies from a guest to the host over the network (a Windows "out of resources" error). This also requires a reboot to fix.

- I've had my entire system slow to a crawl, and waiting 30 seconds just to open the task manager, discovered Workstation is the culprit. Again, I usually have to reboot the host to get it working normally again.

- I've had Workstation completely, or nearly completely, hang just trying to suspend a VM.

My system will still happily work flawlessly for days if I never open VMware Workstation. So the host seems to be as solid as ever.

Seriously, I had none of the above problems under 7.0. And short of the usual Microsoft Windows updates, the only thing significantly different is upgrading to Workstation 7.1 and then being prompted to upgrade VMware Tools on all my VMs. Prior to 7.1, I was a huge fan of VMware and Workstation. Now I'm not so sure.

Has anyone else noticed an increase in problems after upgrading to 7.1? Should I go back to 7.0?

[EdP2]

I have made one change to my guest settings which seems to have made a marked improvement. I have checked the Workstation 'Advanced Option' to disable memory page trimming.

The Help guide states:

". . .Workstation uses a memory trimming technique to return unused virtual machine memory to the host machine for other uses. While trimming usually has little effect on performance and might be needed in low-memory situations, the I/O caused by memory trimming can sometimes interfere with disk-oriented workload performance in a guest"

As low memory has not been an issue, I considered this was a 'safe' option to try. I'll continue to monitor the situation.

[PnwGuy]

I have made one change to my guest settings which seems to have made a marked improvement. I have checked the Workstation 'Advanced Option' to disable memory page trimming.

I'm trying the same. One behavior I noticed today: I paused one VM (no other VMs running) and it quickly appeared to pause. I resumed another VM and, when it didn't immediately open I started timing it. It took a glacial 3.5 minutes to resume. While this was going on I had Resource Monitor running on the host and Windows 7 was intermittently maxing the graph for memory hard page faults. The faults seemed to happen when the "Free" memory went to zero, but the odd thing is there was still about 3 GB of "Standby" memory available.

From what I know, memory marked as "Standby" is simply old cache that's marked for deletion. Win 7 keeps the cache around in case you want to use what's there again, but it's supposed to dump it if it needs more memory. Instead, only with VMware running, my system seems to be preserving this Standby memory and paging to disk instead. Why? Most of this "cache" in this case is really the previous paused VM. Somehow it seems VMware is not making it available for real deletion?

Can someone at VMware please comment if when you pause a VM Win 7 cached host memory is somehow flagged or not eligible to be released under some circumstances? I strongly suspect this is at the root of my remaining slowdown problems (and those of others complaining of similar things)?

The attached screenshot was taken just as the massive page faults stopped and some RAM was (somehow) released. But you can see the large 3GB block of Standby memory that was untouched the entire time Windows was paging itself to death.

EDIT: I have started a new discussion on this memory issue: VMware 7.1 Not Releasing Standby Memory in Win7 Host

[plaskey]

I appologize for the crosspost but I want to make sure this issue gets as much coverage as possible. The conditions and symptoms seem to be very repeatable so I just want to make sure the information gets to the right people. This is a repost from this thread: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1594448#1594448

It seems that that thread withered so I am going to try again here.

I have exactly the same problem on a Dell Latitude E6400 with 4GB of RAM

and 60 GB Free on the HDD and hardware virtualization turned on in

BIOS. Windows XP Pro 32-bit host running Windows XP Pro 32-bit guest,

both with all the latest patches from Microsoft. Guest is a linked

clone with snapshots turned off (virtual HDD not preallocated,

permanent). Guest VM configured for 1GB RAM. Both host and guest HDD's

have been thoroughly defragmented using MyDefrag 4.3.1 (System Disk

Monthly script).

I am running Microsoft Security Essentials, latest beta version, on the

host. While this provides Windows Defender service, which has been

implicated in this problem, I have disabled the service and see no

difference in VMware problem.

Here is my experience:

After booting my E6400 I open VMware Workstation v7.1.1 build-282343

before I do anything else on the host. I then boot the Windows XP

virtual machine and do nothing - just let it run. Occasionally I will

notice that both the host and guest screens stop updating, though I can

see the mouse cursor move. If I click outside the VM, the cursor jumps

back inside the VM. Using Ctrl-Alt to release the cursor does nothing.

At this time I also notice that the host HDD activity light is on

solid. I have no control over either machine beyond the cursor

movement. In fact, Control-Alt-Delete does nothing. After several

seconds everything returns to normal. No crashes, no data loss.

I am completely loosing the use of my computer for about 2 minutes

several times an hour. This is making it very difficult to use VMware.

I have been a fan of this product for many years so I have high hopes

that this will be resolved soon.

Thank you,

Peter

[plaskey]

Follow-up:

Maybe this problem is a regression? I found an old thread about a similar problem when running on Windows 98 that was related to the CD ROM drive in the virtual machine. I disconnected the CD ROM drive from my guest in Workstation and I have not seen the original problem reoccur in the last hour.

[piggyz]

I have made one change to my guest settings which seems to have made a marked improvement. I have checked the Workstation 'Advanced Option' to disable memory page trimming.

-

---

IMHO, this confirm u surely have some problem related with bad memory, missconfigures memory, overclocked processor, wrong bios settings in your host or a mixture of all this.

[PnwGuy]

IMHO, this confirm u surely have some problem related with bad memory, missconfigures memory, overclocked processor, wrong bios settings in your host or a mixture of all this.

I can't speak for EdP, but I've re-tested the RAM on my system, it's not overclocked, BIOS is running the default configuration, and the host PC without VMware is completely 100% stable. A bios or hardware problem would tend to cause lock ups, hard crashes, etc. What I'm seeing are almost entirely performance problems. And I have now documented VMware somehow not releasing large (i.e. 3 GB) blocks of memory which appears to be a huge part of the problem.

[piggyz]

I was referring to EdP. And BTW, Windows 7, especially 64 bit version, is a very strong OS. If u just do some normal use and not stress it, it can last even if there is some hardware related problem. When u do use some stress program like virtualization software, the problems arise. I would advice also to try some stress program like Prime95 or some burn in test to evaluate the stability of a failing machine. And IMHO, reading this thread, EdP machine IMHO is failing somewhere and sometimes.

[EdP2]

ECC ram - 12 hours check - clean bill of health. QED not a ram issue.

[PnwGuy]

I was referring to EdP. And BTW, Windows 7, especially 64 bit version, is a very strong OS. If u just do some normal use and not stress it, it can last even if there is some hardware related problem. When u do use some stress program like virtualization software, the problems arise. I would advice also to try some stress program like Prime95 or some burn in test to evaluate the stability of a failing machine. And IMHO, reading this thread, EdP machine IMHO is failing somewhere and sometimes.

I agree VMware tends to use more RAM than most apps. So that's why I re-tested my RAM. But I don't think VMware otherwise stresses the hardware much. My CPU usage even with VMs loading, unloading, running apps, etc. is typically quite low. The CPU and MB temps barely rise above their low idle levels. My system works a lot harder transcoding large video files with all 8 CPUs near 100% and it can do that flawlessly for hours on end.

And yes, Win 7 64 is a great operating system. I've had almost no problems with it. But if the hardware is bad, even Win 7 can't work around that. So hardware problems would tend to be fatal.

The bottom line for me is one or more things changed for the worse going from Workstation 7.0.1 to 7.1.x and at least one of those seems to be a serious memory management issue that nobody from VMware has yet addressed in this forum.

[EdP2]

One thing I should have mentioned, which may (or may not) be relevent; before running the memory test I double checked my bios settings and found that "support for legacy USB" was somehow or other turned on. (I must of done it at some time but I don't remember when). Apparently with some motherboards this can interfere with ram testing. I have no idea how or why this could interfere with ram testing, but maybe it somehow interferes with block moves/memory management(?), so maybe applicable to VMWare.

In preparation for the memory test I unchecked this support. As an aside, it was after this run that I also changed the Advanced Setting in VMWare, so unfortunately I cannot say which of the two changes resulted in an improvement.

[IntegratedLawMa]

I have been going ape trying to isolate the reason my system started to slow down. I think I have come up with the cause.

My system is an i7 920 with 12G, W7 x64 upgraded from Vista. For various reasons, I disabled the writeback cache on my RAID SATA card and on my straight SATA card. When I installed VMW 7.1 was slow and 7.1.1 seemed slower.

I just re-enabled the writeback cache and VMWare is appreciably faster. I'm not sure whether this is a combination of W7, x64, writeback and VMW 7.1 or what, and I'm not going to take the time to find out. Hopefully this will be a fix for others as well.

Best of luck.