Lag in VMWare Player Absent from Workstation Pro 16

A couple weeks ago I had installed VMWare Player to use the Offensive Security Kali Virtual Machine to go through the OSCP course. Upon installing the VM in VMWare player, I immediately began experiencing a bad issue on both my laptop and my desktop that I did not experience on my previous go-to desktop virtualization application Virtualbox.

There was LAG

Very bad input lag as seen below. The type of lag that kills productivity in a terminal window.

The following is how it was solved.

Installing VMWare Workstation Pro 16

This is a walk through on how VMWare Workstation Pro 16 Trial was installed. The underlying operating system was Debian Bullseye.

The initial step was to download VMWare Workstation Pro 16 Trial for Linux from the following URL:

https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro/workstation-pro-evaluation.html

Then the bundle pack was made executable and installation was attempted.

chmod +x VMware-Workstation-Full-16.2.1-18811642.x86_64.bundle
sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-16.2.1-18811642.x86_64.bundle

The installation failed due to the presence of VMWare Player. VMWare Player needed to be removed before VMWare Workstation Pro Trial could be installed.

sudo vmware-installer --uninstall-product vmware-player

Previous configurations were kept in case vmplayer would be reinstalled later. The install was now retried.

sudo ./VMware-Workstation-Full-16.2.1-18811642.x86_64.bundle

The installation appeared successful.

An issue came up with the lack of polkit, which typically comes with a Linux desktop environment. With most DE environments like gnome, kde, and xfce, polkit is already enabled, but on i3 or openbox it is not. If polkit is not running, there will be an issue with starting VMWare Workstation Pro under the user account, as the client cannot request super user privilege.

/usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 &

VMWare Workstation Pro Trial was then launched¹.

vmware

The EULA was accepted.

The trial version was selected. This launched the UI.

So to recap this section, vmplayer was removed and vmware which is the name for VMWare Workstation Pro 16 was installed.

Install the Kali VM

The following script was used to download, check, and uncompress the Offensive Security’s Kali VMWare VM Image.

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

# Variables
SIG="de78b3f6e1599987934b04c4c1b002c0bde67822591fef0aaf5191e60eef3025"
URL="https://kali.download/virtual-images/kali-2021.3/kali-linux-2021.3-vmware-amd64.7z"
FILE="$(basename $URL)"
DIR="kali-2021.3"

# Make directory for virtual machine image
mkdir -p $DIR
cd ./$DIR
# Download VM image
wget "$URL"
# Verify the download hash of the archive
echo "$SIG $FILE" | sha256sum --check
# Unzip the archive
7zr e "$FILE"
# Remove the archive
rm "$FILE"

Then the image was imported into VMWare Workstation Pro 16. The only setting that was changed from the base image was increasing the Kali VM RAM from 2GB to 4GB.

An initial snapshot was taken of the Kali VM and then it was started.

Results: No Lag!

The lag found in VMWare Player was not found in VMWare Workstation Pro 16. So, if you’re experiencing lag issues with VMWare Player, they do not seem to be present in VMWare Workstation Pro 16, thankfully.

I’ll need to pay for VMWare within 30 days, but it will be worth it to alleviate the frustration of input lag. Also, having snapshots, complex networking, and the ability to run multiple VM’s at the same time will also make Workstation Pro 16 worth the price.

• vmware
• kali
• oscp