Trying to work in a VM, it’s almost unusable. It crashes constantly. How is anyone supposed to use this for any useful work?

Nothing wrong with VMware, if it’s slow it’s the underlying infrastructure that’s at fault.

What Cougar said. How many VMs are on the host? My guess is ‘lots’ or ‘too many’.

It’s slow but not overly slow, it just keeps crashing.

The host is my laptop, just running one, and in unity mode every so often the whole thing just goes tits up.

Could be a dodgy driver. 😆

If I wasn’t so annoyed I’d applaud your clever wit, Drac.

I’ve found that doubling the RAM on my laptop from 4 to 8 GB enabled VMware to run properly.

I’ll take the compliment anyway cheers Molgrips.

As I understand it, your laptop is running two machines, effectively; yours, and the second ‘virtual’ machine, so it’ll need as much memory as you can cram into it for smooth running.

What are you using, VMWare Player?

What’s the spec of the laptop and the VM? If you’ve assigned more resources to the VM than you can physically spare, that wouldn’t be great.

32gb quad core i7. I gave the vm 4 cpus, dunno if that causes a problem or not.

Do you require 4 cores in the virtual machine? Are you specifically using multithreaded apps? I’d stick to 1 or 2 CPU cores.

Try it with two.

With Hyperthreading you’ve got eight ‘virtual’ cores, but the HT cores aren’t ‘real’ cores in that sense. I’d knock it down and see how it goes.

What is the host OS? As above, knock it down a core or two and give it plenty of RAM.

Certainly nothing wrong with VMWare from a stability point of view so could be a driver issue, make sure your drivers and the VM ones are up to date.

Also,

You’ve installed VMWare Tools into the guest OS, yes?

Was told to always start with one core and only up if really needed/available.
With 4 cores allocated to a VM the hypervisor will be waiting for 4 cores to become available before it can do anything, that could explain the problems, same with the RAM allocate only what you really need, too much and it’ll be swapping it out to disk all the time if not available.
Find VMs run on very little. Win7 – I always start with 1GB RAM and a single CPU for example – rarely have to up that and if I do it’s memory.

Sounds like your host isn’t up to the job. I manage several hundred VMs and they all work fine, but then they are running on proper servers 😉

we use vmware at work – slow yes – crash no.

ironically its slowest on the most powerful machine with the most ram.

A few months ago I was developing stuff using three VMs, with three different OSes, all running simultaneously on my laptop and talking to each other via a VMnet. One was actually debugging code on the other. Don’t think VMWare crashed once.

Depending on your hardware vmware should offer some extra speed up. I don’t know if its an increased instruction set to allow direct access to some of the cpu registers via some sort of extra driver or if there is more too it than that but I’ve come across the option when setting up a virtual machine at home. Might be worth a look to check out your mother board.

EDIT: Last time I ran vmwear was about 4 years ago and never had any crashes. Currently running quemu at home and a gain no problems here either. Qemu is worth a look if you only have vmwear player as it can produce vmwear compatible images.