Getting my performance back in Workstation 16

Back in may of last year I was tripping to get my hands on WSL2 with the new backend and improved performance. I wrote a few blogposts about it and even wrote my, to date, most viewed and commented post about it (WSL2 issues – and how to fix some of them).

Now the issue that hurt me the most at first was Workstation 15.5 was not able to run with WSL2 installed as this enabled the Hyper-V features of Windows 10 which collide with Workstation.

The day after WSL2 released VMware pushed 15.5.5 which allowed Workstation to run even with Hyper-V enabled but at greatly reduced performance – just Google it and be amazed.

It does not really come as a surprise as having Workstation (A virtualization engine) run on top of Hyper-V (also a virtualization engine) on top of hardware is not a recipe for performance!

As a result I have not been using my Windows 10 VM that much the last many months – until now!

I got my hands on a Workstation 16 Pro license and went in for an upgrade to see if any of the improvements in 16.1 would alleviate some of my performance issues. And after completing the install which prompted me to enable the Windows Hypervisor Platform I spun up my Windows 10 machine from suspend. I quickly got a popup noting me that I had “side channel mitigations” enabled as show below here:

Now from working with vSphere I realize that many of the side channel mitigations can have heavy impact on performance so I updated my Windows 10 OS and shut it down and followed KB79832 as linked in the popup to disable the mitigations.

I powered on my VM again and could immediately feel the difference. I may not have the exact same performance I had with 15.5 on an non-Hyper-V enabled host but it is a LOT better than it was. Major problem now seems to be that fact that my tiny i7-7600U dual core CPU can’t keep up! Dear Dell when are you rolling out some Latitude’s with Ryzen 7 5800U’s??