How to Maximize VM WS Performance?

[ilcaa]

I am seeing some delays in my VM using Workstation, evealuation V, so newest version.

Host PC is,  WIN 7, Quad Core 2.7, 8 GBs, 700 Gigs HD.  Intel ATA video card.  I run the VM right from this PC so no network issues involved.

have 1 VM installed, a WIN 7, 32bit, allocated 2gb RAM, 60 GB HD, using about 10 GBs.  It seems choppy at times.  some delays when doing some things.  I run some basic software from it, nothing excessive in computations, or high graphics intensive.  I do use 2 monitors and spread it across that (sometimes but find it gets worse)

So I wanted to know what are the factors that most determin the performance of a VM and what I can tweak.  If I use my WIN 7 performance monitoring, RAM, CPU HD is always very low, I have nothing running in the background, So dont know how to troubleshoot getting better performance from my VM

Any thoughts on what factors contribute to better VM performance and what i can tweak?

[Scissor]

Is your guest configured with more than 1 vCPU?  If so, change it to 1 vCPU and try again.  This can make a big difference.

Install VMware Tools inside the Guest.

Verify that you are running the latest version of  VMware Workstation -  7.1.5 was released October 4th.  8.0.1 was released November 17th.

On your Host AntiVirus, exclude the directory containing your Guest files from any AV Real Time Scanning.

[Makcrellon]

Hey all,

I'm currently running VM WS on an i7 940XM laptop with Windows 7 64-bit (16GB RAM, no page file and a 256GB SSD drive).

At present I have my Windows 2008 server test guest machines on the SSD, each configured with 2 processors and 2GB RAM.  My Windows 2003 server test guest machines all reside on my second 500Gb 7200 RPM hard disk.

I was also curious is it advisable to keep the guest machines on only 1 processor?  I'm also curious about maximising performance.  I can have at any one time 4 virtual machines running.

Thanks.

Mack

[kingneutron]

--I would definitely go with (1) vcpu for each VM - especially on a laptop.

[continuum]

almost as important as the number of virtual CPUs are the settings in config.ini

use

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "true"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"           
mainmem.useNamedFile = "false"   
bios.bootdelay = "5000"

for best performance of a few VMs

or

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "false"

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "25"              
mainmem.useNamedFile = "true"

bios.bootdelay = "5000"

to run a horde of VMs at the same time

settings are different for a Linux host - read my notes
http://faq.sanbarrow.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=78&id=76&artlang=en

[ilcaa]

great , thanks for all the help.  I did change the VCPU to 2 recently and didn't put 1 and 1 together.  works better now.

As far as the Config.ini goes.  Where would I find this file.  Does each VM ive created have this file so they each must be tweaked?

or is this in the program directory?  I tried to look and do a search and came up empty.

Please let me know where this file is located to make these changes.  Thanks a million!

[continuum]

open a vmware.log from any of the  VMs you have - search it for config.ini and you will see a line like this:

2011-07-12T23:30:26.421+02:00| vmx| I120: DICT --- HOST DEFAULTS C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

the red part shows the path on your host
if you cant see C:\programdata check explorer settings and display hidden files and dirs

or just type Win + R
notepad C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini

[ilcaa]

excellent

i opened the file and added the new configuration settings from your previous post.  Thanks again for the help and the secrets to getting the best performance out of my VM's!