Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)
OK… I know the wonks at VMware will frown upon this one, but someone posted a similar hack for WS 6.5 beta, so here it is for WS 7.0 beta. I finally got around to installing the beta code this morning and immediately saw a performance issue. VMware Workstation Beta runs in debug mode by default. It can seriously slow down your VMs. If you are playing with vSphere and ESX/ESXi 4.0 inside a VM, it is horribly slow once you get to the VM inside of the VM. This is actually part of the testing VMware would like you to perform while using the beta.
For Linux, you will find the files in /usr/lib/vmware/bin. For Winders, they are probably somewhere in %PROGRAMS%. I usually stick to Linux for my host.
Basically, perform the following to disable debug mode. Shut down VMware first!
sudo mv /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx-debug /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx-debug.old sudo cp /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx-debug

Now, you have tricked the apploader to use the standard build. I would assume you will have similar results with Winders. Just add “.exe” onto the end of the referenced files names. Easy huh?
DISCLAIMER:
This is neither supported nor recommended by VMware. If you have any issues with the beta version and wish to post to the forums or file and SR, you MUST revert back to debug mode and reproduce the error or VMware may not help you. This is a beta TEST. VMware will want debug info to check any suspected bugs before releasing it GA.
2 Replies to “How-To: Disable Debug Mode in Workstation 7.0 Beta”