I've been using VMworkstation 7.1 for a couple of years now on Win XP Pro, Vista Pro and Win 7 Pro hosts, with no reall issues at all. I just a acquired a new personal laptop running Win 7 Home Premium. VM installed fine, but I've had issues replicating the same guest Linux boxes I build without a second thought on the other machines. I built my first one with all defaults (1024 mb memory) with no problems, but when I tried to go bigger (2048mb) the virtural machine just hung on the first restart (installing Oracle Linux requires a restart after initial load, then a second after some initial OS config).
I spent most of yesterday building, deleting, building a vm with different memory allocations, trying to find a pattern. Started at 1024 mb, then increased by 128mb at a time, looking for a breaking point. To speed up the process, I took all defaults during installation, including DHCP network config, even though I normall assign a fixed IP. Got all the way to 2048mb with no problem, then tried with a fixed IP and got the problem. At this point I recreated with DHCP, then changed it to fixed IP after the fact. No problem, so tried one more time to build with fixed IP from the ground up, and this time it worked.
Then 'hang' occurs on reboot, immediately after the 'vmware' flash that appears to amount to the bios load prior to the OS load. No messages appear from the OS when this occcurs.
So, I'm left with not being able to reproduce the problem in a controlled manner. All I know is that I've never had this problem on my work machine, which is
- Win 7 Pro, 32-bit
- 4gb ram
- AMD cpu
Whereas my personal computer (with the issue) is
- Win 7 Home Premium, 64-bit
- 4gb ram
- Intel i3 CPU
And so simply ask if anyone sees any issues with my current config?