Workstation Pro 17.6 extremely slow on Windows 11 23H2

[mascf]

After upgrading from Workstation Pro 17.5.2 to 17.6 my VM is painfully slow to respond to anything, even a right click in the guest takes a long time to respond.  The guest and host OS version are the same, Windows 11 23H2.

[louyo]

Is it affecting the host?

What does task manager show (more details) for host and guest? Perhaps the VM is paging, or the host OS is paging (use perfmon)?

[mascf]

The slowness only affects the Guest not the Host.

[mascf]

The slowness never occurred with any prior version of VMware Workstation
and nothing has changed on the host or the guest. Workstation Pro was
upgraded from 17.5.2 to 17.6, it's just 17.6 that's causing the slowness.

[mascf]

Uninstalled 17.6 and installed 17.5.2, this resolved slowness issue.  I'll wait for version 17.6.1 before I'll update again.

[mascf]

There's no paging happening and all resources are low utilization. The
host has 64GB RAM and the guest is allocated 16GB RAM. As this never
occurred prior to upgrading to 17.6 this is an issue with this version of
Workstation Pro for Windows 11 23H2 guests only. Doesn't happen with older
Windows 11 guests or Windows 10 guests. At times the slowness for the
Windows 11 23H2 guest is crippling and there's still very low utilization
on the system.

[kasper]

Did you check the Windows event logs on both host and guest?

[mascf]

I gave up on this issue and reinstalled 17.5.2 and that resolved the
slowness issue. So many people are having multiple issues with 17.6. Rule
of thumb for all software is never install any release that ends in 0, it's
full of bugs. I'm not upgrading again until they release 17.6.1.

[Dave Tudor]

I experienced exactly the same. Reverting to 15.5.2 fixed it as well. Likewise I'll wait for 17.6.1.

[Karan Malhotra]

I have the same behavior with VMWare Workstation Pro 17.6 and guest OS Windows 11+ Windows 10. Screen tearing when moving windows + sluggish input and missed keys when I type quickly. Its a disaster. I will downgrade later today. Such a waste of time.

[Jaroslav Cihal]

I had to return on 17.5.2. Upgrade 17.6 is unusable.
I lost a lot of valuable time with this update.
Do not install 17.6. version.

[Dodge DeBoulet]

Also downgraded to 17.5.2 and the performance level returned to normal. Before downgrading, I tried disabling side channel mitigations and saw immediate improvement, but it didn't last.

Lets hope that our new virtual overlords figure out what's going on and get it fixed...

[piggyz]

+ 1

17.6, for me, it is not that slow, then it messed up CPU and power states, so it act weird sometimes. I have to say I didn't try Windows guests, then with Linux guests it happen the virtual machines freeze when not in use and ALWAYS when the machine is running and you put the host in hybernation (I didn't try standby); when you resume the session, you can find your running guests freezed or extremely slow. In that case you can suspend them and when you resume them they become responsive again. In the case they freeze under load, you just can turn them off and still in this cases they messed up with real hardware (like blocking keyboard) until you kill them.

Reverting to 17.5.2 everything is back to normal.

Reading the 17.6 changelog I can see they mostly just removed things and also they supposedly solved a slow issue on windows hosts for user mode. I think - IMHO - maybe this caused all those timing problems I experienced with 17.6, they probably messed up with emulated cpu power states.

Hope they solved, then this first realease completely made under the broadcom name is disappointing, IMHO.

[tieske]

I'm having the exact same thing! For what it's worth, I'm having an Ultra 7 155H CPU.

[stanhelp]

I'm getting the same issue with host Ubuntu 20.04 and guest is Windows 11 Pro version 24H2.  My host CPU's are maxing out every minute.  I'm going to try to go back to 17.5.2 to see how this works. VmWare 17.6.0 is very disappointing.

Update: After upgrading to 17.5.2 shortly after the above post no more freezes on the Windows 11 Pro guest.

[Philipp Seifert]

We had the same issue and the situation improved for us when running VmWare Workstation as administrator. This is only a workaround and it should not be run as admin because of security risks, but not being able to use the VM at all is worse