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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

Awesome Windows Fusion VM built

Finally after a marathon installation session I have a Windows XP SP 2 Fusion-built VM, installed and up and running.

Specs:

Windows XP SP2 VLK,

Dual Processor,

Monolithic, Pre-Allocated 10 GB disk,

LSI Logic SCSI Adapter,

Intel PRO/1000 (e1000) Network Adapter,

CD/DVD, and

Sound,

Fusion VMware Tools (Complete)

After Windows applies its 1 million patches, I'll upgrade to IE 7 and start playing with USB devices like the iSight. I can't wait to do that.

Thanks for everyone's help and support, thanks to HPReg for getting me past the floppy config issue.

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bgertzfield
Commander
Commander

Hi rcardona,

I'm glad you went through the exercise, but I think you'll find that pre-allocated disks won't really be immensely faster than the default. Let us know if you find otherwise!

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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

Thanks for sharing your opinion, but I prefer monolithic, pre-allocated disks for these reasons (likely the same as VI3):

1. Guaranteed space if I accidentally run out of disk space on the host.

2. Not to have to periodically shrink my image, speaking of, is there a shrink utlity for Fusion? I can always use Parallels Compactor Smiley Wink

3. I prefer to run a disk optimizer such as Diskeeper in the Guest and I'm not sure how well that works with dynamically expanding disks.

4. Preventing host file fragmentation.

Thanks for your suggestion.

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bgertzfield
Commander
Commander

Sorry, I didn't mean to quash your excitement -- I'm really glad you were able to get everything working!

By the way, there is an alert in VMware Fusion if your system runs low on disk space, so it isn't quite as bad if dynamically-allocated disks are used on a system that's running out of disk space.

I don't know if pre-allocated disks will help at all with host file fragmentation; the host is free to fragment the pre-allocated disk just as easily as it could fragment a dynamically-allocated disk.

That being said, the default Mac OS X filesystem (HFS+) is quite good at avoiding fragmentation on its own. Here's some thoughts and data from Amit Singh's excellent site talking about filesystem fragmentation on OS X:

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/apme/fragmentation/

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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

>By the way, there is an alert in VMware Fusion if your system runs low on disk space, so it isn't quite as bad if dynamically-allocated disks are used on a system that's running out of disk space.

Good info to know. I'm pretty good at keeping space available but importing Video is such a disk hog!

>I don't know if pre-allocated disks will help at all with host file fragmentation; the host is free to fragment the pre-allocated disk just as easily as it could fragment a dynamically-allocated disk.

It's also possible to mark a file as immovable like swap. I'm also considering having a fixed partition solely for my pre-allocated disks. I would like to settle on one of each Windows and Linux workhorse VMs.

>That being said, the default Mac OS X filesystem (HFS+) is quite good at avoiding fragmentation on its own. Here's some thoughts and data from Amit Singh's excellent site talking about filesystem fragmentation on OS X:

You're preaching to the choir. I own copy (and have read over 500 pages) of Amit's hard cover Mac OS X Internals[/i].

http://www.amazon.com/Mac-OS-Internals-Systems-Approach/dp/0321278542/sr=8-1/qid=1161619533

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Hi rcardona with regards to the shrink question you need to have tools running inside of the GOS and can run it from there and it should work

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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

How does your suggestion work for an image to shrink itself? Or are you talking about using one VM to shrink another.

My preference is to have a host-level operation where I can shrink a VMDK offline, e.g. a GUI or CLI option

VMware Virtual Disk Manager - build 29996.

Usage: vmware-vdiskmanager.exe OPTIONS diskName | drive-letter:

Offline disk manipulation utility

Options:

-k : shrink the specified virtual disk[/code]

Thanks

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HPReg
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Ben is talking about the Tools feature to Shrink. Look at your VMware Toolbox. There should be a tab to shrink the virtual disks of the VM. Has been there since WS 2.0 I think. It works in two phases:

1) One phase in the guest to fill the empty space of the virtual disk with zeroes (requires guest filesystem knowledge)

2) One phase on the host to shrink the zeroed sectors from the .vmdk file.

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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

Thanks I know about 1. If VMware is making dynamically growable disks as the exclusive option in Fusion, then you should provide the ability to shrink VMDK files on the host (Phase 2). Yes, I can do this in another VM by SMB mounting my host's drive but that is a relatively cumbersome process.

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HPReg
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

I'm confused. Last time I checked, when you started the process inside the guest, both #1 and #2 happened. Is it not the case anymore?

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rcardona2k
Immortal
Immortal

I'm using a monolithic, pre-allocated disk at the moment. On my next dynamic disk VM I'll give this a try.

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