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VMware Fusion performance

M

maigado

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 29, 2007
68
0
Running Fusion on my 2+ year old MBP has become a near hopeless frustration. When I first got the machine, it ran pretty well, but it hasn't for quite awhile now. It tends to be sluggish to the point of uselessness. Currently, I'm doing a trial of Fusion 3. I'm a licensed owner of the prior versions.

I don't need it much, but when I do, I really need it. I gave up on using it with Windows 7, which is fine, XP will do. Once in awhile, I'll run it and all will be well. Other times, most of the time, it's unusable. I see no pattern to what makes it run well or not. Earlier today, I rebooted and started Fusion all by itself and didn't run anything else. Didn't help much.

Anyone had these problems and found a solution? I see lots of people with problems and plenty of others without. But not many who've bridged the gap.
 
can you elaborate a little more on your machine specs? I have been using Vmware Fusion 2 and 3 on my 2.5 Ghz C2D without any serious problems. I first had 2GB of RAM and while I could not run other apps while running the instance it ran fine. When I upgraded to 4GB it ran significantly faster. My point is Vmware, like any virtualization app is ram and CPU hungry and if you don't properly feed it, it will slow down.
 
cuestakid, I've got a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo SR MBP with 4GB of RAM. I've devoted 1024MB of the RAM to the VM, which is more than what's recommended.

Your username rings a bell, not on a personal level, but from the kid part. We're probably something bordering on being neighbors.

applevx, maybe it's time to give Parallels a try.
 
I have been a long time VMware user and proponent from my vast Windows experience and chose VMware Fusion when I moved over to Mac last year. Just last week however I made the switch to Parallels for the same reasons you are experiencing now. I thought my VM was consuming far too much memory to justify even using a VM.

Now that I've been using Parallels for a week... I mean actually using it... I find my "VM" performance is at least as good and very possibly better and there is a significant freedom of RAM.

I am running a MBP 2.4 ghz with 4 GB RAM and was considering biting the bullet on a 4 GB stick to boost me to 6 just to support the VM. 4 seems like more than enough now. My vote goes to Parallels. Sorry VMware.
 
It's too soon to tell for sure, but after an hour or two with Parallels, the difference is dramatic in its favor. Fan speed has stayed put at 2000 rpm and the CPU temp is unchanged as well. With Fusion, the fan instantly sped up, even under the best of circumstances. The Windows app I'm using is working like a charm.

It'll take more time to draw any real conclusions, but for the moment, Parallels may have saved the day.

Thanks, all!
 
applevx said:
It's been talked for a long time now. Parallels desktop is always less resource hungry yet more powerful than VMWare fusion.
Click to expand...
I don't know about less resource hungry but it faster. I wouldn't say more powerful and its quite a bit more unstable then vmware. The people who produce parallels seem intent on adding features instead of making existing features work or work well.

To the OP, did you check out the forums over on vmware? They're quite helpful.

Also make sure you have the enable diagnostics check box unchecked and you have the proper guest os selected in the virtual machine library.

Fusion 3 has does have some optimizations for win7 so try and depending. I'm running win7 (on my 2.53 mbp) and it runs very well. I don't have the experience index numbers before me but they were very good especially compared to what bootcamp had.
 
Reports of stability issues and bugginess are what steered me towards Fusion to begin with. I haven't checked their forums in this current period of bad performance, but I was doing it in the past. Nothing really helped a whole lot. The settings you mention, maflynn, have been as you suggest.

I'll take another look at the Fusion forums.
 
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