Windows 7 or Windows 8 takes a long time to shutdown with VMWare workstation 10

As listeners to the podcast know I like VMWare products a lot. Although I use vSphere ESXi servers mainly, I routinely use their Workstation product to create VMs (virtual machines) to test things prior to trying them out on client’s systems.

I noticed that a Windows 8.x VM took a long time to shutdown. I thought it was that one VM at first until I found another VM running Windows 7 that had the same issue. I investigated and came up with a solution. Here’s how I fixed the problem.

Edit this file on the computer running the VMWare Workstation:
C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

Add these lines to the end of the file:

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = “100”
mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE”
mainMem.partialLazySave = “FALSE”
mainMem.partialLazyRestore = “FALSE”