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bigbod
Contributor
Contributor

Virtual PC within Fusion. Extremely Slow?

Hi,

I'm running a Windows 2000 Professional VM using Microsoft Virtual PC[/i] within VMware Fusion (Windows XP Profesional SP2) on a MacBook Pro (2.16GHz Core Duo, 2 Gb Memory).

Why? I have a old development environment which I need to reference periodically. I have no other performance issues with VMware 1.0, but the Virtual PC VM is unusably slow (it takes half an hour to start).

Does anyone else use Virtual PC within Fusion? Just wondering is there's anything I can do to improve performance.

Any assistance appreciated.

Regards

Rod

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2 Replies
admin
Immortal
Immortal

Have you tried using VMware Converter to convert the VPC image into a VMware image? That would allow you run your W2K environment directly under Fusion.

Converter is a free download. Although it has both a paid and a free license mode, I believe that converting Virtual PC images is among the things you can do in its free mode (so-called "Starter Edition"). (Caveat: I've never done it myself, and I have no VPC images here to test with.)

http://www.vmware.com/download/converter/

Converter is a Windows-only tool, so you will want to run it inside your XP VM. After you start it, launch the "Import Machine" wizard, tell it you want to import a "Standalone virtual machine, backup, or disk image", and then point it at the VPC VM's .vmc file.

Unfortunately, Converter's current version (3.0.1) can only emit Workstation 5 VMs, which are a little behind Fusion VMs. But they'll run just fine under Fusion, just without some of its more advanced features--which, for Windows 2000, you probably don't care about anyway.

If you want to make a real live Fusion VM, use Fusion's New Virtual Machine wizard, and, when prompted for a virtual disk size, instead choose the advanced option of pointing at an existing virtual disk: the one Converter wrote for you.

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admin
Immortal
Immortal

Running virtualization products within virtualization products is extremely slow because we're our own worst-case workload. There's not much you can do about this -- maybe[/i] forcing VT mode on might help -- but the better plan is as Brian said: import the virtual machine and run it directly.

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