TOPIC: ICON SOFTWARE
Fixing Windows 11 freezing issues in VirtualBox with KVM paravirtualisation
23rd November 2022Recently, I have been trying to get Windows 11 to run smoothly within a VirtualBox virtual machine, and there has been a lot of experimentation along the way. This was to eradicate intermittent freezes that escalated CPU usage and necessitated hard restarts. If I were to use Windows 11 as a long-term replacement for Windows 10, these needed to go.
An internet search showed that others faced the same predicament, yet a range of proposed solutions did nothing for me. The suggestion of enabling 3D graphics capability did nothing but produce a black screen at startup time, so that was not a runner. It might have been the combination of underlying graphics hardware and the drivers on my Linux Mint machine that hindered me when it helped others.
In the end, a look at the bug tracker for Windows guest operating systems running on VirtualBox sent me in another direction. The Paravirtualisation interface also may have caused issues with Windows 10 virtual machines, since these were all set to KVM. Doing the same for Windows 11 seems to have stopped the freezing behaviour so far. It meant going to the virtual machine settings, navigating to System > Acceleration and changing the dropdown menu value from Default to KVM before clicking on the OK button.
Before that, I have been blaming the newness of VirtualBox 7 (it is best not to expect too much of a fresh release bringing such major changes) and even the way that I installed Windows 11 using the streamlined installation or licensing issues. Now that things are going better, it may have been a lesson from Windows 10 that I had forgotten. The EFI, Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 requirements of Windows 11 also blind sided me, especially given the long wait for VirtualBox to add such compatibility, but that is behind me at this stage.
Given that Windows 11 is not perfect, Start11 makes it usable and the October 2025 expiry for Windows 10 also focuses my mind. It is time to move over for the sake of future-proofing if nothing else. In time, we may get a better operating system as Windows 11 matures and some minds surely are thinking of a "Windows 12". Depending on how things go, we may get to a point where something vintage in the nature of Windows XP, Windows 7 or Windows 10 appears. Those older versions of Windows became like old gold during their lives.
Migrating a Windows 7 Virtual Machine from VirtualBox to VMware Player
14th October 2012Seeing how well Windows 8 was running in a VMware Player virtual machine and that was without installing VMware Tools in the guest operating system, I was reminded about how sluggish my Windows 7 VirtualBox VM had become. Therefore, I decided to try a migration of the VM from VirtualBox to VMware. My hope was this: it would be as easy as exporting to an OVA file (File > Export Appliance... in VirtualBox) and importing that into VMware (File > Open a VM in Player). However, even selecting OVF compatibility was insufficient for achieving this, and the size of the virtual disks meant that the export took a while to run as well. The solution was to create a new VM in VirtualBox from the OVA file and use the newly created VMDK files with VMware. That worked successfully to give me a speedier, more responsive Windows 7 VM for my pains.
Access to host directories needed reinstatement using a combination of the VMware Shared Folders feature and updating drive mappings in Windows 7 itself to use what appeared to it as network drives in the Shared Folders directory on the \\vmware-host domain. For that to work, VMware Tools needed to be installed in the guest OS (go to Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools to make available a virtual CD from which the installation can be done) as I discovered when trying the same thing with my Windows 8 VM, where I dare not instate VMware Tools due to their causing trouble when I last attempted it.
Moving virtual machine software brought about its side effects, though. Software like Windows 7 detects that it's on different hardware, so reactivation can be needed. While Windows 7 reactivation was a painless online affair, it wasn't the same for Photoshop CS5. That meant that I needed help from Adobe's technical support people top get past the number of PC's for which the software already had been activated. In hindsight, deactivation should have been done before the move, but that's a lesson that I know well now. Technical support sorted my predicament politely and efficiently while reinforcing the aforementioned learning point. Moving virtual machine platform is very like moving from one PC to the next, and it hadn't clicked with me quite how real those virtual machines can be when it comes to software licensing.
Apart from that and figuring out how to do it, the move went smoothly. An upgrade to the graphics driver on the host system and getting Windows 7 to recheck the capabilities of the virtual machine even gained me a fuller Aero experience than I had before then. Full-screen operation is quite reasonable too (the CTRL + ALT + ENTER activates and deactivates it) and photo editing now feels less boxed in too.