VMware Workstation is an excellent virtualization software that I use to manage multiple operating systems, making it convenient for testing and development tasks.
System Freeze in the Virtual Machine
After purchasing a new computer, I set up a virtual machine using VMware to create a testing environment for software, running Windows 11.
The installation process went smoothly, but problems emerged during usage. After booting into the guest machine's desktop, the mouse pointer started lagging, and the system's response became sluggish. Soon after, the guest machine completely froze and became unresponsive. At that point, the guest machine couldn't be shut down normally and had to be forcibly powered off through VMware’s interface, equivalent to pulling the power plug. Restarting the machine led to the same result, making the virtual machine unusable.
Operating Environment
Host configuration:
- Processor: i7-12700K
- Memory: 16 GB
- Hard Drive: NVMe SSD
- Operating System: Windows 11 Pro, 64-bit
- VMware Version: Workstation 17 Pro (17.5.2)
Guest configuration:
- Number of CPU cores: 4
- Memory: 4 GB
- Hard Drive: 64 GB
- Operating System: Windows 11 Pro, 64-bit
The virtual hardware resources of the guest machine met the minimum requirements for Windows 11, so I suspected the issue might stem from some misconfiguration.
After some investigation, I found a solution.
Solution
The solution is quite simple: Run VMware with administrative privileges.
Cause Analysis
The problem lies in how the Windows 11 system handles CPU core scheduling.
Starting with Intel's 12th-generation (Alder Lake) processors, a hybrid architecture has been adopted, which features Performance Cores (P-Cores) and Efficiency Cores (E-Cores). In this architecture, the P-Cores handle heavy workloads with high frequencies and hyper-threading, while the E-Cores are responsible for lighter tasks and improve multi-threading performance and efficiency. This design balances processor performance and power consumption.
When the virtual machine froze, I observed in the host’s Task Manager that all four cores allocated to the virtual machine were small cores, and they were all under heavy load. This inefficient core allocation caused the virtual machine to malfunction.
By running VMware with administrative privileges, the software can apply a proper CPU core scheduling strategy.
Additional Ways to Reduce Lag
If your host system uses an Intel processor from the 12th generation or later, running VMware as an administrator should solve the issue. If it doesn’t, you can try the following methods:
Disable Hyper-V
Hyper-V is Microsoft’s hardware virtualization technology. Many third-party virtualization software (like VMware) cannot work alongside Hyper-V. The VMware Workstation installer also reminds users to disable the Hyper-V feature. You can check out Microsoft’s detailed documentation here.
To disable or enable Hyper-V, open a command prompt with administrative privileges and execute the following commands:
- Disable Hyper-V:
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off- Enable Hyper-V:
bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype autoAdjust Virtual Machine Settings
Try allocating more CPU cores or memory to the virtual machine.
In the virtual machine settings, choose an appropriate processor configuration. For example, enable or disable certain options under the Virtualization Engine settings.
Reinstall VMware Tools
VMware Tools is a utility for VMware virtual machines. If the guest machine has been cloned or migrated, VMware Tools might not be correctly installed or could have an incompatible version. Reinstalling VMware Tools may resolve the issue.
Disable Side-Channel Mitigations
In virtualized environments, certain security measures are usually enabled to prevent side-channel attacks (such as Meltdown and Spectre). These measures include:
- Additional context switching, which increases CPU overhead and affects virtual machine performance.
- Restricting the use of certain instructions, which may impact the efficiency of applications.
- Implementing cache isolation to protect data between virtual machines, which affects memory access speed.
While these measures enhance system security, they might reduce performance. Depending on your needs, you can strike a balance between security and performance.
You can enable or disable side-channel mitigations by going to the Virtual Machine Settings, under the Options tab, and selecting the Advanced option.
Disable Efficiency Cores in the CPU
You can disable the CPU’s efficiency cores in the BIOS and only use the performance cores. This way, you avoid the core scheduling issue.
I hope the information above helps improve your experience with VMware.