Sunday 30 May 2010

Virtualisation: Poor performance in VMWare Player or Workstation

Since Microsoft have decided to throw us a curve ball with regard to 64-bit desktop virtualisation, I have recently been experimenting with VMWare Player as a replacement to MS VPC for SharePoint 2010 development. I noticed that almost every speaker at the SharePoint 2010 Evolution conference earlier this year was using the workstation version (required for commercial use) for demonstration purposes.

Whilst I am generally very happy with the VMWare software, one issue troubled me today. While the majority of the time my Virtual Machine performed satisfactorily, it did seem to "freeze" or hang every minute or so. During this time, the mouse and keyboard were unresponsive and I had no choice but to wait a few seconds for the machine to sort itself out.

After putting up with this for a few hours I became frustrated and decided to delve into the VMWare log (simply called "vmware") contained on the host machine, only to find the following:

============

May 30 17:31:49.154: vcpu-0| FLOPPYLIB-LIB : Win32Ioctl: syserror The device is not ready.

May 30 17:32:42.095: vcpu-0| FLOPPYLIB-LIB : Win32Ioctl: syserror The device is not ready.

May 30 17:32:42.107: vcpu-0| FLOPPYLIB-LIB : Win32Ioctl: syserror The device is not ready.

May 30 17:32:46.692: vcpu-0| FLOPPYLIB-LIB : Win32Ioctl: syserror The device is not ready.

============

To resolve this, I simply opened up the virtual machine settings and tweaked a few settings:

  • Unchecked "Connected" and "Connect at power on" for the Floppy device
  • Unchecked "Connected" and "Connect at power on" for the Sound Card device
  • Unchecked "Connected" and "Connect at power on" for the Printer device
Lo and behold - the problem disappeared instantly and I am now happily using my 64-bit VMWare VM!

Benjamin Athawes


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Posted by Benjamin Athawes at 19:15

2 comments:

  1. Jeremy3 July 2011 at 23:15

    Lo and behold indeed! I just tried the same thing, especially the sound card. And it seems to now be much more responsive.

    I'll need to test it fully, but the performance increase did seem instant.

    Thanks for posting this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jeremy4 July 2011 at 04:25

    Commenting again after around 6 hours of use: The solution definitely works. Machine has been responsive. Pages load faster inside the server guest. Sharepoint is behaving.

    Spot on solution!

    ReplyDelete

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