The Configurations You Should Not Miss in WMWare Workstation

There are 2 important configurations you should not miss out in WMWare Workstation

• Power Mode if you are using Intel 12th generation CPU.
• Disable swapped memory if you have sufficient RAM in your host.

Power Mode

When I migrated to Intel 12th generation CPU, I realized my WMWare Workstation became quite laggy. After searching online extensively, the P-Core/E-Core configuration coupled with the power management mechanism has a huge impact on the Ubuntu performance in the VM.

TL; DR

You should select “Best Performance”. Otherwise, VMWare Workstation could not fully utilize the cores despite you seemingly allocate enough cores.

If you are keen on evidence.

My VM is set to 8 processors but only 4 cores are utilized during the stress test

stress: info: [33214] dispatching hogs: 8 cpu, 0 io, 0 vm, 0 hdd
stress: info: [33214] successful run completed in 30s

After setting to “Best Performance” mode, we can see all the cores are utilized.

Swap Memory Setting

By default, VM Ware allows some virtual machine memory to be swapped. If you have sufficient RAM, I recommend you fit all vm memory into reserved host RAM. Take note that you should tailor the reserved memory to what the virtual machine needs and keep some buffer for the host.