Extensive use of HDD after VmWare Player virtual machine is closed

Question

Each time I close virtual machine in VmWare Player I see extensive use of HDD in my system. Basically, whole system becomes unresponsive for about 5-7 minutes.

Host system is Windows 7 Utimate x64 SP1 with 6 GB of memory, i3-M350 processor. Virtual machine is Windows XP SP3 x86 (2GB of memory allocated for VM).

What can be the cause and what can I do to solve the issue?

UPDATE: I am not shutting down the VM, I just close Player window and VM saves it's state. System becomes unresponsive right after VM have saved it state (as indicated by Player) and Player itself have closed.

UPDATE 2: As M'vy suggested I used Resource Monitor to find out that it's the System process who is responsible for disk I/O. This process saves VM memory file with about 500 Kb/s speed.

I'm still amused why host OS becomes unresponsive. After all, I can watch video (about 2500 Kb/s read speed) or copy files with comparable speed and do not see any problems.

Answer 1

Not a real answer, but rather a way to diagnose this: windows 7 has a good monitoring GUI

Start Tak Manager > Performance > Ressource monitor

The disk I/O tab should give you a hint if it's still the vmware player that is using disk access, and on which file.

I bet that the 2GB of memory that have to be saved take a while to write on the disk, but I'm still surprised for the freezing effect.

Answer 2

If the virtual machine state is saved (virtual machine suspended instead of fully shutting it down), the contents of it's memory are persisted on disk. This tends to be rather IO heavy and take some minutes (unless you have an SSD or fast RAID).