Fixing Slow/Hanging VMWare Guests

Problem: Your VMWare guests may be incredibly slow or all together hang.

Solution: (One potential one) Check if your VMs disks have become corrupted. Repair them if so.

Steps:

Do the following with your VM powered off!

1. Find the logs for your VM. They’re usually in the VM’s root directory, eg

   E:\VMs\2012R2\Win2K8R2.vmwarevm

2. Open the latest logfile in that directory, eg vmware.log

3. Search for “repair”

4. If you find hits similar to the example below, you’ll need to run the disk repair utility.

   2015-02-13T14:00:06.102-05:00| vmx| I120: DISKLIB-DSCPTR: Opened [2]: “Virtual Disk-s003.vmdk” (0xa)
   2015-02-13T14:00:06.107-05:00| Worker#0| I120: DISKLIB-SPARSE: “E:\VMs\2012R2\Win2K8R2.vmwarevm\Win2K8R2-s001.vmdk” : failed to open (14): Disk needs repair.

5. Open a command prompt and navigate to your VMWare install directory. On my system it’s:

   C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation

6. Run the following command, where “” is the folder containing your VM’s disk—likely the same folder you found the logfile in above.

   vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -R

7. Start your VM back up. Once it’s back up and stable, check the latest logfile and search for the same “repair” error. If “repair” isn’t found, search for the same file opening entry just before you ran the utility:

   2015-02-13T14:00:06.102-05:00| vmx| I120: DISKLIB-DSCPTR: Opened [2]: “Virtual Disk-s003.vmdk” (0xa)

8. Verify there aren’t any errors.

Hopefully this will get you up and running!