Windows VM Networking Question

So I run a work VM using VMware with a Windows 10 Pro guest.

I’ve allocated 8 CPU cores and 16GB of RAM to it and it seems to run fine.

My issue seems to be more of an annoyance then anything else but hopefully somebody can point me to some tweaks I can make to get this working in an optimal fashion.

The issue is that my company no longer uses the Digium desk phones that were great and easy to use, I had no issues using my old Plantronics wireless earpiece with it.

Now we are using Ringcentral with their Softphone applet.

The issue is that frequently when I minimize my VM window to go to my host I will hear crackling in my headset.

When I maximize the window the same, this is repeatable by just doing this over and over again.

Of course my Digium setup didn’t have this issue so I’m thinking it’s a network adapter QoS setting ?

My host is Windows 10 Pro with 64GB of ram and a Threadripper 2950x CPU.

I have the VM running off a Samsung 2TB NVMe SSD along with the host OS.

Since I want to separate my personal machine from my work machine I created the VM for it.

Any tips or suggestions ?

How are you accessing the VM? I’m guessing via RDP. You could try running it as a session inside something like MobaXterm instead of the Windows RDP client.

I’m accessing it directly from the host machine, no RDP.

It running now minimized while typing this reply.

The funny thing is that the normal audio from the guest works fine, I only notice this crackling sound while actually talking to a customer or a co-worker while using the Ringcentral Softphone applet.

Ah, VMware, gotcha. Is the headset plugged into a USB port assigned to the VM or are you using audio pass through to use the same headset on the VM and host?

It might be worth trying via RDP, you’ll probably get other problems but in theory audio should work fine. It might help isolate where the problem is.

I can try this RDP thing and see, it is the same Corsair Headset connected onto a USB port and works fine for all other AUDIO output and works find under the Ringcentral applet until I minimize and maximize the VMware window.