VMware Workstation Gen 9 P4: BOM2 Workstation/Win11 Performance enhancements

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There can be a multitude of factors that could impact performance of your Workstation VMs. Running a VCF 9 stack on VMware Workstation demands every ounce of performance your Windows 11 host can provide. To ensure a smooth lab experience, certain optimizations are essential. In this post, I’ll walk through the key adjustments to maximize efficiency and responsiveness.

Note: There are a LOT of settings I did to improve performance. I take a structured approach by trying things slowly vs. applying all. The items listed below are what worked for my system and it’s recommend for that use case only.

Host BIOS/UFEI Settings

  • There are several settings to ensure stable performance with a Supermicro X11DPH-T.
  • Here is what I modified on my system.
  • Enter Setup, confirm/adjust the following, and save then changes:
    • Advanced > CPU Configuration
      • Hyper-Threading > Enabled
      • Cores Enabled > 0
      • Hardware Prefetcher > Enabled
      • Advanced Power Management Configuration
        • Power Technology > Custom
        • Power Performance Tuning > BIOS Controls EPB
        • Energy Performance BIAS Setting > Maximum Performance
        • CPU C State Control, All Disabled
    • Advanced > Chipset Configuration > North Bridge > Memory Configuration
      • Memory Frequency > 2933

Hardware Design

  • In VMware Workstation Gen 9: BOM1 and BOM2 blogs we covered hardware design as it related to the indented load or nested VMs.
  • Topics we covered were:
    • Fast Storage: NVMe, SSD, and U.2 all contribute to VM performance
    • Placement of VM files: We placed and isolated our ESX VMs on specific disks which helps to ensure better performance
    • PCIe Placement: Using the System Block diagram I placed the devices in their optimal locations
    • Ample RAM: Include more than enough RAM to support the VCF 9 VMs
    • CPU cores: Design enough CPU cores to support the VCF 9 VMs
    • Video Card: Using a power efficient GPU and help boost VM performance

VM Design

  • Disk Choices: Matched the VM disk type to the physical drive type they are running on. Example – NVMe physical to a VMs NVMe disk
  • CPU Settings: Match physical CPU Socket(s) to VM CPU settings. Example – VM needs 8 Cores and a Physical host with 2 CPU Sockets and 24 cores per Socket. Setup VM for 2 CPU and 4 Cores
  • vHardware Choices: When creating a VM, Workstation should auto-populate hardware settings. Best vNIC to use is the vmxnet3. You can use the Guest OS Guide to validate which virtual hardware devices are compatible.

Fresh Installs

  • There’s nothing like a fresh install of the base OS to be a reliable foundation for performance improvments.
  • When Workstation is installed it adapts to the base OS. There can be performance gains due to this adaption.
  • However, if you update the OS (Win10 to Win11) with Workstation already installed, you should always reinstall Workstation for optimal performance.
  • Additionally, when installing Workstation I ensure that Hyper-V is disabled as it can impact Workstation performance.

Exclude Virtual Machine Directories From Antivirus Tools

NOTE — AV exceptions exclude certain files, folders, and processes from being scanned. By adding these you can improve Workstation performance but there are security risks in enabling AV Exceptions. Users should do what’s best for their environment. Below is how I set up my environment.

  • Script: Use a script to create AV Exceptions. For an example check out my blog – Using PowerShell to setup AV exceptions for Workstation 25H2u1 and Windows 11.
  • Manual Steps: Manually setup the following exceptions for Windows 11.
    • Open Virus and Threat Protection
    • Virus & threat protection settings > Manage Settings
    • Under ‘Exclusion’ choose ‘Add or remove exclusions’
    • Click on ‘+ Add an exclusion’
    • Choose your type (File, Folder, File Type, Process)
    • File Type: Exclude these specific VMware file types from being scanned: 
      • .vmdk: Virtual machine disk files (the largest and most I/O intensive).
      • .vmem: Virtual machine paging/memory files.
      • .vmsn: Virtual machine snapshot files.
      • .vmsd: Metadata for snapshots.
      • .vmss: Suspended state files.
      • .lck: Disk consistency lock files.
      • .nvram: Virtual BIOS/firmware settings. 
    • Folder: Exclude the following directories to prevent your antivirus from interfering with VM operations 
      • VMware Installation folder
      • VM Storage Folders: Exclude the main directory where you store your virtual machines
      • Installation Folder: Exclude the VMware Workstation installation path (default: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\).
      • VMware Tools: If you have the VMware Tools installation files extracted locally, exclude that folder as well. 
    • Process: Adding these executable processes to your antivirus exclusion list can prevent lag caused by the AV monitoring VMware’s internal actions: 
      • vmware.exe: The main Workstation interface.
      • vmware-vmx.exe: The core process that actually runs each virtual machine.
      • vmnat.exe: Handles virtual networking (NAT).
      • vmnetdhcp.exe: Handles DHCP for virtual networks.

Power Plan

Typically by default Windows 11 has the “Balanced” Power plan enabled. Though these settings are good for normal use cases, using your system as a dedicated VMware Workstation requires a better plan. Below I show how to use a script to create a custom plan or manually make similar adjustments.

  • Script: I created a script that creates a custom power plan named “VMware Workstation Performance Plan” and makes all the needed changes for my system. You can find my blog here.
  • Manual Adjustments:
    • Open the power plan. Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Power Options > Change settings that are currently unavailable
    • You might see on every page “Change settings that are currently unavailable”, just click on it before making changes.
    • Set Power Plan:
      • Click on ‘Hide Additional Plans’.
      • Choose either “Ultimate Performance” or “High Performance” plan and then click on “Change plan settings”
      • Hard Disk > 0 Minutes
      • Wireless Adapter Settings > Max Performance
      • USB > Hub Selective Suspend Time out > 0
      • PCI Express > Link State Power Management > off
      • Processor power management > Both to 100%
      • Display > Turn off Display > Never

Power Throttling

Power throttling in Windows 11 is an intelligent, user-aware feature that automatically limits CPU resources for background tasks to conserve energy and extend battery life. By identifying non-essential, background-running applications, it reduces power consumption without slowing down active, foreground apps.

To determine if it is active go in to System > Power and look for Power Mode

If you are using a high performance power plan usually this feature is disabled.

If you are running a power plan where this is enabled, and you don’t want to disable it, then you can maximize your performance by disabling power throttling for the Workstation executable.

powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path “C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe”

Sleep States

Depending on your hardware you may or may not have different Sleep states enabled. Ultimately, for my deployment I don’t want any enabled.

To check if any are from a command prompt type in ‘powercfg /a’ and adjust as needed.

Memory Page files

In my design I don’t plan to overcommit physical RAM (640GB ram) for my nested VM’s. To maximize the performance and ensure VMware Workstation uses the physical memory exclusively, I follow these steps to configure global preferences, individual VM settings, and the host configuration file.

  • Configure Global Memory Preferences: This setting tells VMware how to prioritize physical RAM for all virtual machines running on the host. 
    • Open Workstation > Edit > Preferences > Memory
    • In the Additional memory section, select the radio button for “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”.
  • Disable Memory Trimming for each VM: Windows and VMware use “trimming” to reclaim unused VM memory for the host. Since RAM will not be overallocated, I disable this to prevent VMs from ever swapping to disk.
    • Right-click your VM and select Settings
    • Go to the Options tab and select the Advanced category.
    • Check the box for “Disable memory page trimming”.
    • Click OK and restart the VM
  • Force RAM-Only Operation (config.ini): This is an advanced step that prevents VMware from creating .vmem swap files, forcing it to use physical RAM or the Windows Page File instead.
    • Close VMware Workstation completely.
    • Navigate to C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\ in File Explorer (Note: ProgramData is a hidden folder).
    • Open the file named config.ini with Notepad (you may need to run Notepad as Administrator).
    • Add the following lines to the end of the file:
      • mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”
      • prefvmx.minVmMemPct = “100”
    • Save the file and restart your computer
  • Windows Page Files: With 640GB of RAM Windows 11 makes a huge memory page file. Though I don’t need one this large I still need one for crash dumps, core functionality, and memory management. According to Microsoft, for a high-memory workstation or server, a fixed page file of 16GB to 32GB is the “sweet spot.” I’m going a bit larger.
    • Go to System > About > Advanced system Settings
    • System Properties window appears, under Performance choose ‘Settings’
    • Performance Options appears > Advanced > under Virtual memory choose ‘change’
    • Uncheck ‘Automatically manage paging…’
    • Choose Custom size, MIN 64000 and MAX 84000
    • Click ‘Set’ > OK
    • Restart the computer

Windows Visual Effects Performance

The visual effects in Windows 11 can be very helpful but they can also minimally slow down your performance. I prefer to create a custom profile and only enable ‘Smooth edges of screen fonts’

  • Go to System > About > Advanced system Settings
  • System Properties window appears,
  • On the Advanced Tab, under Performance choose ‘Settings’
  • On the Visual Effect tab choose ‘Custom’ and I chose ‘Smooth edges of screen fonts’

Disable BitLocker

Windows 11 (especially version 24H2 and later) may automatically re-enable encryption during a fresh install or major update. By default to install Windows 11 it requires TPM 1.2 or higher chip (TPM 2.0 recommended/standard for Win11), and UEFI firmware with Secure Boot enabled. BitLocker uses these features to “do its work”.

But, there are a couple of ways to disable BitLocker.

  • Create a Custom ISO
    • My deployment doesn’t have a TPM modules nor is Secure Boot enabled. To overcome these requirements I used Rufus to make the Windows 11 USB install disk. This means BitLocker can not be enabled.
  • Registry Edit (Post-Installation – may already be set):
    • Press Win + R, type regedit, and press Enter
    • Navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\BitLocker
    • Right-click in the right pane, select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value
    • Name it PreventDeviceEncryption and set its value to 1
    • Disable the Service:
      • Press Win + R, type services.msc, and press Enter.
      • Find BitLocker Drive Encryption Service.
      • Right-click it, select Properties, set the “Startup type” to Disabled, and click Apply.

Disable Side-Channel Mitigations: Disabling these can boost performance, especially on older processors, but may reduce security.

  • Open the Windows Security app by searching for it in the Start menu.
  • Select Device security from the left panel.
  • Click on the Core isolation details link.
  • Toggle the switch for Memory integrity to Off.
  • Select Yes when the User Account Control (UAC) prompt appears.
  • Restart your computer for the changes to take effect

Clean out unused Devices:

Windows leaves behind all types of unused devices that are hidden from your view in device manager. Though these are usually pretty harmless its a best practice to clean them up from time to time.

The quickest way to do this is using a tool called Device Cleanup Tool. Check out my video for more how to with this tool.

Here is Device Cleanup Tool running on my newly (<2 months) installed system. As you can see unused devices can build up even after a short time frame.

Debloat, Clean up, and so much more

There are several standard Windows based features, software, and cleanup tools that can impact the performance of my deployment. I prefer to run tools that help optimize Windows due to their ability to complete tasks quickly. The tool I use to debloat and clean up my system is Winutil. It’s been a proven util for not only optimizing systems, installing software, updates, but helping to maintain them too. For more information about Winutil check out their most recent update.

For ‘Tweaking’ new installs I do the following:

  • Launch the WinUtil program
  • Click on Tweaks
  • Choose Standard
  • Unselect ‘Run Disk Cleanup’
  • Click on Run Teaks

Additionally, you may have noticed Winutil can create an Ultimate Preforamnce power plan. That may come in handy.

References and Other Performance Articles:

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