Eric Mack On-Line

Challenges with VMWARE Workstation 6.5.3 and Notes 8.5.1 and TCP

Monday, December 14th, 2009

I'm having problems with VMWARE and Notes 8.5.1. and it;'s killing my productivity. My last request for help on my blog was fruitful so I thought I would try again.

For development and testing, I maintain VMs with various versions of Lotus Notes and I use VMWARE to manage these. Since upgrading to 8.5.1, hoever, my system will freeze for 3-4 minutes and then return as if nothing had happened. It does this often -- but only when running the VMWARE Workstation.

Some more details:

My Host PC is a ThinkPad W500 fully loaded with 2.5Ghz Core2 Duo CPU, 3GB RAM, XP Sp3. and very few apps loaded, namely Notes 8.51 and the latest VMWARE Workstation 6.5.3 Build 185404.

Guest OS is Windows XP SP2, with 1.5GB ram allocated. When we run the VM, we have no apps running on host OS and in the guest PC the only app loaded is Notes 8.5.1 Client and Designer. In other words, before I launch the VM I exit out of Notes on my laptop.

If I open notes 8.5.1 in the guest PC and do nothing after a few minutes the entire system will freeze HOST & GUEST but then, after 3-4 minutes everything will return with no local of place or data - as if nothing were wrong.

I can't say that this is a Notes 8.5.1 issue. It could well be an issue with the current version of VMWARE Workstation. In fact, I would tend to suspect VMWARE as the cause as my entire computer hangs, not just the guest OS session.

Anyway, I thought I would put this out to the blogosphere in the hope that someone who has seen this before might comment and so that others may learn from the comments.

Oh, and one more symptom: From time to time, I will completely lose TCP support on my laptop and Notes will display this error on the status bar of the Notes client (on host).

"Replicator error, the TCP/IP protocol stack reported that it ran out of memory. Consult your network documentation to increase configured memory, or reduce Notes connections by limiting clients (See SERVER_MAXSESSIONS parameter in Notes Admin Guide)" What;s strange is that this error appear on my workstation - not on the server as the error message would suggest...

Could this be an unstable VM? Or, a conflict with VMWARE and ECLIPSE? Or even operator error on my part? (That's been known to happen, too.)

Posted at 22:04:00, PST in Lotus Notes

Discussion/Comments (4):

Challenges with VMWARE Workstation 6.5.3 and Notes 8.5.1 and TCP

Interesting. We have moved from VMWare to VBox some months ago so I can't provide a direct solution but I can at least add this little piece of information:

We have installed 851 in several VBoxes and 802 and 85 had been installed on VMWare.

When facing serious issues with the test environment it has always been the VM and most time the network settings (in both, VMware and Vbox). One time we had to uninstall the network drivers manually in order to make sure really everything was removed and then properly reinstall new drivers from scratch.

Posted at 12/15/2009 4:06:22 by Lucius Bobikiewicz

Challenges with VMWARE Workstation 6.5.3 and Notes 8.5.1 and TCP

I don't have an answer, but I do have a very similar situation. Thinkpad T61, 3GB RAM, Windows XP SP2, VMware Workstation 6.5.3. I run Notes 6.5 in the host OS, 8.5.1 in one VM, and 7.0.3 in another. I also get the mysterious pauses, although mine don't last as long: 15-90 seconds. During the pauses, my disk light is on solid. I can move the mouse, but nothing that I click on (in host or guest) will respond. I also get this behavior sometimes when I put the computer into standby.

During the time that the computer is frozen, it sometimes looses connectivity in one of the VPN's that I use, presumably because my computer was not able to respond to a 'keep alive' packet in time. Maybe there is something similar going on with your connectivity issues. I also often get the pause just after I suspend a VM.

Reading your post made me realize that it isn't just happening to me, and there must be a solution out there, so I just did some research. Here is a post that sounds promising:

{ Link }

I'm going to give it a try.

Posted at 12/15/2009 5:03:59 by Stuart Bogom

Challenges with VMWARE Workstation 6.5.3 and Notes 8.5.1 and TCP

I use VMs quite a bit to support my clients and to test the latest code drops.

Are you using XP as the OS in the VM?

I found a minimum install of win2003 server ran better as the client OS. I use it for Notes 5.0.3, Notes 7.0.4, 8,5,1 and 8.5.2 cd1 without any problems. All are using the full client since I do Dev & admin.

The only issue I have is the client nor refreshing the DNS when I go to a client site. I had to use Location docs with IP addresses to work around it.

Posted at 12/15/2009 6:49:26 by Bruce Lill

Challenges with VMWARE Workstation 6.5.3 and Notes 8.5.1 and TCP

Hello,

I had a similar issue. What I found is that the wmiprvse.exe program was running during the hang. This seems to be related to all network communication between the virtual machine and the host network. By removing all unused network drivers seems to improve the situation. This includes items such as the Fax facilities and the COMx ports. While this has not completely eliminated the problem, I have cut it down to about a 5 - 10 second hang.

Hope this helps,

Jeff

Posted at 12/15/2009 20:16:32 by Jeff Twardowski

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