4 Replies Latest reply on Feb 16, 2009 5:47 AM by Mijaki

Tweaks for a virtual machine with lots of ram

IdeCable May 31, 2007 9:56 AM

I am looking forward to hear of the avaiable tweaks for Vmware Server 1.0.3 for a virtual machine with lots of ram.

Here's my specs for my host hardware & OS:

\- AMD 64 X2 @2.5Ghz

\- nVidia SATA Controller: 3Gigs/secs in cached reading and 80Megs/secs in buffered reading

\- 4Gig DDR2 667Mhz

\- Suse 10 i686

\- Software RAID1 storing ReiserFS partitions.

There's only one virtual machine:

\- Windows 2000 Server (as a domain controller), SQL 2000, Exchange 2000

\- 3.6Gigs of RAM

\- ACPI multiprocessor enabled (with two virtual CPUs)

\- Every virtual hard drives are using the default SCSI emulation with pre-alocated disk space.

Here's what I added to my vmx config file (to optimize the speed of my vm)

memsize = "3600"

MemTrimRate="0"

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

Is there anything else I can do to tweak this vm even more??

Any comments/suggestions is more than welcome.

1. Re: Tweaks for a virtual machine with lots of ram

Aldebaran May 31, 2007 10:06 AM (in response to IdeCable)

Because of the "all or none" scheduling for CPUs that VMware uses, I would set the VM to use one CPU instead of two unless the guest is truly CPU bound.

Jeff
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2. Re: Tweaks for a virtual machine with lots of ram

IdeCable May 31, 2007 11:19 AM (in response to Aldebaran)

Thx for the note.

After a few tests here: I found Windows 2000 Server to boot faster with two CPUs.. My SQL 2000 Server perfoms better if I set it to only use my primary CPU in my VM.
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3. Re: Tweaks for a virtual machine with lots of ram

spectVM May 31, 2007 1:11 PM (in response to IdeCable)

After a few tests here: I found Windows 2000 Server
to boot faster with two CPUs.. My SQL 2000 Server
perfoms better if I set it to only use my primary CPU
in my VM.

I have the same issue with my AMD based (2x 2212 opty) server.
Single vCPU VMs perform better with CPU affinity to a primary core.
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4. Re: Tweaks for a virtual machine with lots of ram

Mijaki Feb 16, 2009 5:47 AM (in response to spectVM)

Can anyone explain this?

"Single vCPU VMs perform better with CPU affinity to a primary core"

Stupidity knows no boundries, especially mine
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