macOS Sierra VM on ESXi Freezes Periodically every ~10s for about ~10s about macos HOT 7 CLOSED

How much memory have you allocated to your VMs? At the bare minimum I recommend at least 2GB of RAM - I usually only see this problem in ESXi boxes that try to constrain memory more than that.

from macos.

I have 4GB dedicated to the macOS Sierra 10.12.0 and 10.12.1 VMs.

The VM runs fine for 10s then pauses for 10s, the pattern is very stable, so I think it is not memory pressure but something else, something is triggering the VM to lock up, but then it comes good again, and this keeps repeating.

from macos.

How many CPU cores are configured in the Vagrantfile?
Does it also freeze when only 1 core is used?

from macos.

Good question. I'll check this out and post back.

from macos.

from macos.

I had a similar issue using Vagrant + VMWare Fusion for our macOS boxes. My Vagrantfile explicitly set the ram to 2048 MB but didn't set the number of cpus. Once I set the cpus to 2, the problem went away.

For posterity here is my working Vagrantfile:

ENV['VAGRANT_DEFAULT_PROVIDER'] = "vmware_fusion"
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.provider "vmware_fusion" do |vb|
    vb.memory = "2048"
    vb.cpus = "2"
  end
end

from macos.

Thanks for the tip regarding number of CPUs. I checked and I had it set to 1 socket x 1 core == 1 logical CPU. I am now testing 1 socket x 2 cores == 2 logical CPUs. This is working well, boot up is much faster and I no longer get the 10 seconds of freezing. I will update my Packer templates to ensure i set vCPUs to 2.

Based on this it appears that prior to 10.12 Sierra, OSX was fine with 1 vCPU, but on 10.12 Sierra (and my guess is going forward but time will tell) 2 vCPUs is needed to prevent severe performance degradation.

from macos.