VMware Fusion ...

SInce upgrading to OS X Lion my version of VMware Fusion is pretty much unusable. I am currently on Fusion 3.13. Does anyone have any tips on how to get my XP or Win7 VMs to run normally? It is so slow that the entire machine is rendered unusable.
I have a 2007 Mac Mini with 4GB and a 500GB 7200rpm disk in it. Ran ok under Snow Leopard. Not great just OK. But now it runs like total garbage. I do need an XP partition for usw in my job. Changepoint doesn't work on any browser but IE.
Thanks in advance ...

Then you may just need to install the new version to see if it's better. If not you can simply not buy a serial number for it. Then you can try using Parallels to see if it's faster. Parallels was definitely faster than VM Fusion comparing the last two versions running under Snow Leopard.
However, I'd guess more RAM would be a help. Lion requires 1 GB more RAM than Snow Leopard. I don't know how many applications you run concurrently, but with only 2 GBs or less allocated to OS X you are stretching. And, it will be aggravated if you have a slowish hard drive with little free space.
You might open 'top' in a Terminal window just to see what's going on:
About OS X Memory Management and Usage
Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
Memory Management in Mac OS X
Performance Guidelines- Memory Management in Mac OS X
A detailed look at memory usage in OS X
Understanding top output in the Terminal
The amount of available RAM for applications is the sum of Free RAM and Inactive RAM. This will change as applications are opened and closed or change from active to inactive status. The Swap figure represents an estimate of the total amount of swap space required for VM if used, but does not necessarily indicate the actual size of the existing swap file. If you are really in need of more RAM that would be indicated by how frequently the system uses VM. If you open the Terminal and run the top command at the prompt you will find information reported on Pageins () and Pageouts (). Pageouts () is the important figure. If the value in the parentheses is 0 (zero) then OS X is not making instantaneous use of VM which means you have adequate physical RAM for the system with the applications you have loaded. If the figure in parentheses is running positive and your hard drive is constantly being used (thrashing) then you need more physical RAM.
Adding RAM only makes it possible to run more programs concurrently. It doesn't speed up the computer nor make games run faster. What it can do is prevent the system from having to use disk-based VM when it runs out of RAM because you are trying to run too many applications concurrently or using applications that are extremely RAM dependent. It will improve the performance of applications that run mostly in RAM or when loading programs.

Similar Messages

Using a VMware Fusion XP environment with multiple Mac users

Hi,
I have installed an XP environment using VMware Fusion. I am only able to start this XP environment when logged in as the user that created it. How can I grant access to this environment to other MAC users on my machine?
Any input is much appreciated.
Kind regards, Hans.

Thanks all, thanks for your input. I have been able to solve it now.
As suggested I moved the VMWARE file to the shared folder. Then I assigned read/write access rights to the specific users. This is something I had not tried before. Somehow just moving to the shared folder did not change access rights on file level.
Thanks all,
Hans.

Run Windows 8.1 Pro on a SDXC card via VMware Fusion

Hi everyone,
I'm kinda new to the whole Mac story.
Have been using iPhone and iPad from day one, but never could get myself to go off Windows.
Well, a few weeks ago I bought myself a 13.3" MBP (Mid 2014 - 11.1 model).
It's the retina one with a 256GB SSD in it.
Now my question is...
I have a license from work for VMware Fusion 7, and I need some programs to run on Windows.
But I don't wan't to partition my drive and run it via bootcamp, I want to keep my Mac clean.
Does anyone have experience or know if I can run this on a SDXC card?
I would use a 128GB SDXC card with 60MB/s write and 80MB/s read.
Can I stick this SD into the slot, install Windows 8.1 Pro via Fusion on this card and let it run on a decent level?
Thanks in advance,
And with best regards,
Sonicje

Thank you for the fast responds.
I took a look into it and you are right.
The read/write speed is much higher and cheaper.
But, like I said, I'm nog willing to share my drive with Windows.
So I'm going to buy a 64GB USB stick (less than 60 euro) and going to install it on that source.
With 64GB I've some extra space for the futher if I need to work with more Windows only programs.
Thanks again for the advice!

Need to repair disk frequently, only happens after running VMWare Fusion, though

I have to repair my disk by booting with command-R at least twice a week. The disk gets corrupted and peformance goes down the toilet.
I have finally isolated that it happens only after I am have run VMWare Fusion 3.1.3. Whether I leave it open or suspend the VM doesn't matter. Of course the solution from VMWare was "pay for an upgrade to Vmware 4", but that is not in the cards for me.
Anyone have similar issues or problems.
Model Name:          MacBook
Model Identifier:          MacBook6,1
Processor Name:          Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:          2.26 GHz
Number of Processors:          1
Total Number of Cores:          2
L2 Cache:          3 MB
Memory:          4 GB
Bus Speed:          1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version:          MB61.00C8.B00
SMC Version (system):          1.51f53
Serial Number (system):          W89433W88PX
Hardware UUID:          8DB112AF-8BE0-5614-A976-77A0D903A028
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State:          Enabled

Tony Politano wrote:
Sorry, I should have been clearer on the VMware response. 3.1.3 is the lowest version they run on Lion and should work (minus the bells and whistles of 4), but I think he was just trying to upsell me 4.
Unfortunately, no. While the initial response from VMware was the release of the 3.1.3 update, it was quickly determined from all the reports that people were still experiencing issues with 3.1.3 on Lion. (I suspect it became more prevelant after the 10.7.1 and 10.7.2 updates. For the record, I did not have an issue with 3.1.3 on Lion, but I upgraded to Fusion4 before 10.7.1 came out.) While not everyone experienced an issue with 3.1.3 on Lion, there were enough reports coming in that VMware has pretty much stopped saying 3.1.3 is ok on Lion. But old webpages with outdated info still live on in Google, etc.
On a brighter note, VMware dropped the price of Fusion. Fusion3 was $70 when it was initially released. Fusion4 is $50. So from that point of view, VMware is give you $20 off.

Running win 7 pro on Mac. VMware fusion - Help

Hey Guys,
I bought a mac and well I have been missing a few of my favourite PC programs so I have now installed VMware Fusion and put windows in and I logged into last night really quickly before I went to bed.
A few questions I have if someone can please help me with is :
1. How do I jump across to the windows OS ?
2. Do I need to transfer the app from my external to internal mac HD
3. Do I need winzip or is it still mac or once I goto the windows OS.. I can use normal winzip ?
sorry to ask so many noobish questions I just want to make sure I can run 3 main things from my Pc on the Mac and been told it was through Fusion which looks like the windows OS.
Please can someone help me out with these questions.

Hi and welcome to Discussions,
since Fusion is not an Apple product it would be better to use their own Support resources here http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/support.html
Regards
Stefan

Mini displayport to vga limits second screen resolution in VMWare Fusion

I am using a Mini Displayport to VGA adapter which works fine in except when I use it with VMWare fusion. In VMWare I am unable to use the secondary display effectively. My screen does extend but I am unable to interact with anything on the second monitor.
help!

Hi m,
This sounds like it could be a Fusion issue. If you don't get help here, you may want to contact Fusion's tech support.

Vmware Fusion 3.0 and OSX 10.7.4

Vmware Fusion 3.0 was working fine until I upgraded to 10.7.4. After that it has stopped working and gives two or three errors about kernel space, etc and refuses to start.
A Windows 7 virtual machine was in a suspended state when I upgraded the OS. Was this a mistake and should I have completely quit Windows before updating? If so what is the way out now? Will it start working again if I delete the virtual machine and install Windows again?
Thanks in advance

Thanks for your quick response, PAHU. However, I tried out your suggestion and, first of all, it wouldn't let me import the Virtual Machine which I had copied out to an external drive. The name of the file was just grayed out and it wouldn't let me click on it. Then I tried to create another Win 7 virtual machine and it came up with the same error messages as before. These messages, in sequence, are as follows:
"Unable to retrieve kernel zone sizes"
"Failed to initialize monitor device"
"Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to"
The same messages appeared when I tried to create a Win XP Professional virtual machine.
As I said in my previous message, this has only started happening after I upgraded Mac OSX to 10.7.4. It was working fine up to 10.7.3.

VMWare Fusion and slow system: solution

Having seen few answers to this problem on the Forum and many posts with the same issue, and finally figuring it out myself, I post a solution to the sluggish behaviour of SnowLeopard when VMWare Fusion 3 is running, and the beachball keeps appearing whenever you do anything else outside Fusion.
I had allocated a lot of memory to the virtual machine during installation (with 4 Gb on board I thought let's make it fast) but this turns out to be a bad idea.
• do a restart fo your Mac and wait untill all startup processes have finished (VMWare should NOT be one of the startup processes in this test)
• turn on the activity monitor and open the tab System Memory.
• now fire up your virtual machine and check how much memory is set to INactive. In my case this was a lot, reducing free memory to almost zero
So for any other activity that is going on behind the scenes (emails, dropbox syncs, TimeMachine etc etc), memory swaps are necessary which take time (and may lead to crashes sometimes).
To solve this issue
• shot down virtual machine (not VMWare Fusion
• select Virtual Machine > Settings > Processors & RAM and trigger the help file to get instructions depending on your requirements.
e.g. virtual Windows XP, running only Office or a browser, requires no more then 1 processor, 512 Mb RAM.
• now start your virtual machine again and check the Memory usage in the Activity Monitor. Your system should be a lot snappier now.

Sijmons wrote:
Having seen few answers to this problem on the Forum and many posts with the same issue, and finally figuring it out myself, I post a solution to the sluggish behaviour of SnowLeopard when VMWare Fusion 3 is running, and the beachball keeps appearing whenever you do anything else outside Fusion.
I had allocated a lot of memory to the virtual machine during installation (with 4 Gb on board I thought let's make it fast) but this turns out to be a bad idea.
There's a free electronic book (because of sponsorship by VMware): Take Control of VMware Fusion 3" (http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/vmware-fusion-3) that has advice on RAM allocation with VMware Fusion 3 and many other topics. You might find it useful.

Problem with vmware fusion 3.1.3 after upgrade to Lion

Greetings,
I have some problems with my vmware fusion 3.1.1 after my update to OS X v10.7.
i used a MacBook pro 17'' half a year old.
I used VMWare Fusion 3.1.3 and bootcamp to. I have make no backup bevore i upgrade.
The path of my virtual machine couldn't be found and so the virtual maschine didn't start after this upgrade.
I hope that i musn't reinstall my virtual Windows 7 machine.
I'am searching for a resulution and found this:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=display KC&externalId=1003483
Cannot open the disk '/Users/<User Name>/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/dev/disk0s3/Boot Camp partition.vmwarevm/Boot Camp partition.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
But i would save the virtual machine bevor i reinstall VMWare Fusion 3.1.3.
Have anyone a idea how i found my virtual machine.
Greetings from Germany
Kim

According to: http://roaringapps.com/app:61 Version 3.1.3 has issues with Lion. There is a 2011 beta that works better.

VMware Fusion v4 on MacBook Pro 17 vs. MacBook Air

Hello everybody,
I have a problem with my early 2011 MacBook Pro 17'' when running VMware Fusion v4 Trial - both the VM as well as my MBP are running annoyingly slow when I start up a VM. Switching from the VM to a Mac app takes what seems an eternity. When setting up an OS in the VM, the Mac becomes almost unresponsive. This applies to VMs running Windows 7, Windows XP, Mac OS Lion.
I just can't believe that the MBP is not powerful enough to operate on Lion OS while running a VM at the same time. I have experimented giving the VM 1,5GB RAM and 2GB RAM - doesn't make a difference.
VWware slows my Mac down so much that both the Mac and the VM become unusable.
Same thing happened when I installed the Parallels 7 Trial.
I don't believe that the Mac has any hardware issue - it performs satisfyingly and is as fast as you'd expect from a current model, when not running any virtualization app.
And here comes the real catch now: on my mid 2011 MacBook Air - which has a slightly slower CPU - VMware is blazingly fast and I can use Mac OS in parallel without hardly noticing that the VM is running.
Yes, I am aware that because of the SSD the overall impression makes the MBA probably appear a lot snappier, but then again it has only 2 cores as opposed to the MBP's 4 cores. However, I had absolutely no issues running VMware Fusion v3 when I was still on Snow Leopard with my MBP17.
So the machine can't be the problem, it was running fine before Lion with VM application, but the VM software is doing fine on a MBA, so the only two explanations left that I have are: the combination must be the problem (MBP17 + VM) or the MBP17 has some funny setting that I am not aware of which slows it down that much.
Does anyone experience similar problems?
Any solution for performance issues that anyone is aware of?
Help greatly appreciated

Thanks a lot! Tried what you suggested and it actually seemed to improve VMware Fusion v4 in the beginning but I soon ended up with an estimated 30% of the performance for both the VM and the Mac.
Finally I tought - hey, the whole system (physical hardware and the VM) always becomes slow when there's acutal disk access... so I checked the disk in Disk Utility - and there it was: it needed repair. So I rebooted from an install disk and repaired my MacIntosh Hard Disk and there you go: MUCH better.
Switched from VMware Fusion to Paralles in the end because VMware had issues with IE in the VM and seemed slower.
Problem solved

Sharing iTunes on a Mac with VMware Fusion

I want to share my iTunes library on the Mac side of my MacBook Pro with the Windows VMware Fusion machine. I'm hoping to just point the Windows side to my shared Mac iTunes folder. I can see the folder (under Edit...Preferences...Advanced - it shows up as Z:\Music\iTunes) but haven't been able to have the actual songs show up in the Music Library on my Windows iTunes.
Is anyone else doing this?

There is a separate Windows forum in the Discussions where your question should probably be posted because it has nothing to do with the Finder and Dock.
Ideally, however, you should post it on the VM Fusion forum since the question has to do with using VM Fusion.

VMware Fusion suddenly hogging resources and fan running constantly

I have had my MacBook for about a year now and until 2 weeks ago had no problems with this issue before. Now suddenly, if I launch VMware Fusion (even not running any programs) the MacBook fan comes on and stays on. When I launch the Mac "Activity Monitor' App, sure enough VMware is hogging all the resources. I have added nothing to the XP side of things during this time. Any ideas on what might be happening as the constant fan 'on' issue is a pain and it FEELS like it's a drag on regular Mac performance. Thanks.

Is it possible that your Anti-Virus software (Not sure if you installed one) is performing a scheduled virus scan at bootup? Until that is finished, it will continue to attempt to start/finish the scan at boot up.
Just a thought.
Axel F.

VMWare Fusion and Windows (any version)

Hey everyone, first of all I'm new to Macs so please don't flame me.
I recently bought VMWare Fusion 2.0 for my Macbook so that I can run my Windows XP Home Edition virtually from my BootCamp Partition without having to reboot in order to switch back and forth between the 2 operating systems.
However, I noticed that I cannot open files from Windows XP with Mac exclusive applications such as Garageband, iMovie, or even Preview without having to copy it to my Mac Partition and opening it from there. Is this feature available on VMWare Fusion? I know that for Parallels Desktop 4.0, which my brother uses, you can right-click on a file on the virtual Windows operating system, go to "Open with," and then there will be options to open the file for Mac exclusive applications in the list of recommended programs.
Thanks a lot for any help, feedback, or suggestions you guys can provide!

Consult the Fusion user guide, or post questions regarding Fusion on VMWare's own forums for Fusion:
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/desktop/fusion

VMWare Fusion - Beach Ball City

I am an experienced VMWare user and am having the hardest time with Windows 7 running in VMWare fusion. My physical device runs more than fine, has more than enough memory and should by rights, run a Windows 7 VM with ease. I am seeing nothing but beach ball and having extremely slow responses no matter what I do. I initially migrated a Windows 7 VM that was hosted on a Win7 Dell Laptop under VMWare Workstation 7. Under that platform, the VM ran very well, almost to the point that I had confusion as to which instance was the VM. After migration, I did a remove/reinstall of VMWare tools, tried using more/less memory (originally configured with 2g of memory) Did everything I could to optimize performance. The Virtual Drive was only 40g. I even tried building a Win7 VM from scratch on VMware fusion, but still get the same results.
I know plenty about VMWare on Windows, but not Mac. I have been a Mac user for a very long time and am a career System Designer for a very large Aerospace company in the US. I have seen it all and typically can figure things out, but this one is just annoying me to no end. I want to have them both on one device and have each perform like they should with today's hardware. I know I can do the Hackintosh thing, but that isn't legit and while a Win7 image can be loaded on just about anything, the Mac OS X disk isn't that forgiving.
I just want to know some pointers, because I have run a Win7 x64 VM on my Dell, that has a single Dual-core proc and 4g of memory without performance problems but try to run the same VM on my Macbook (more proc and twice the RAM) and it just hangs. Something has to be set wrong somewhere and I just don't know VMware Fusion well enough to tell.

VMware Fusion Community wasn't any help?
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/desktop/fusion
http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2009/01/windows-7-on-a-mac-with-vmware-fusion -some-quick-tips.html
Are you using v. 3? maybe try Parallels 6 and see the difference?
What are you running in Windows?
Did you install Windows on its own partition running native, and then enable and activate in Fusion? how does it run natively on MBP? and what are the specs of MBP?
Oh, and as to beach ball issue, run disk repair from another hard drive or your OS X DVD; or invest in 3rd party. It actually could be an issue with HFS file system and directory, so rule that out.
If it happens only with or in VM, well I assume your clean install of Windows, and you would CHKDSK if that was an issue.

VMware Fusion vs Parallels Desktop 3.0

i want to run Windows XP or Windows Vista on my mac.
which among VMware Fusion and Parallels would be a much better program/software to buy?
what are the pros & cons of each?
should i buy now or would waiting for Leopard's release (with a new Boot Camp version) be much better?
thanks.

I have Parallels installed on my wife's MacBook and I have Fusion installed on mine. I think if you are using it in a home environment, Parallels would be better as it's snazzier in it's implementation. But for a work type environment, I would recommend Fusion. VMWare has lots of experience with virtualization, and if you have a Linux/Windows VM that is already built and configured, it would be quite easy to just port it over to Fusion to run.
Fusion is probably playing a bit of catch up with Parallels but eventually it will get there, and I expect them to overtake Parallels.
Both software has free trials, and I would recommend that you download both and try them out to see which one you would prefer.

VMWare Fusion unity view vm apps crash under Mavericks

Just upgraded to Mavericks. All good, except unity view in VMWare Fusion of my Windows XP vm doesn't work. It boots fine, and windows pop up. But as you click on them, instead of being able to use a program either (1) the window disappears from view, or (2) the program crashes. MS Access crashes all the time as soon as unity view is engaged. Mac OS report says, "KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE." Clearly, VMWare Fusion's unity view and the new multiple monitor support in Mavericks are not compatible. I need an update, like, today!

that is NOT a solution. If you do this, you have the same fullscreen ******** like in mountain lion! http://d.pr/i/6b9V

VMware Fusion ...

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for