Slow vm experience - Diskeeper??

[AMcCreath]

I recently installed Diskeeper Pro (current version), on my WinXP Desktop - Centrino Dual Core 2GB RAM.

The general speed of my PC sped up nicely, but over the last two weeks my virtual machines (XP/ Vista) have ground to a halt on boot up, some taking 15minutes to get to a usable state.

Is it possible that Diskeeper is fragging my virtual disk???

Or does anyone have any other thoughts.

Just to give it some perspective, I have been running the VM defrag tool on my virtual disk (40GB allocated/ 17GB used) for the last 1hr 15 mins ish, and I'm about 5-10% of the way through.

Many thanks,

Andy

[kingneutron]

--Try JKDefrag instead -- I prefer it over diskeeper

http://www.kessels.com/Jkdefrag/

-- Suspend all VMs and Close VMWARE;

--Run JKDEFRAG on the Host 1st; then you can install it in the VM(s) and run it there too.

--I have a customized script to ONLY defragment files (quicker than moving everything around.) For best results resize the output window to just 4 lines or so, or run it minimized -- display updates are a huge bottleneck.

--You might want to modify it for your needs and use it inside the VM:

BEGIN z-optc.cmd

[[

cd "C:\Documents and Settings\admin\My Documents\JkDefrag-3.36"

c:

jkdefragcmd -a 2 -d 3 c:

cd\

invirtusfreespace

rem above command zeros the free space

pause

]]

./. If you have appreciated my response, please remember to apply Helpful/Correct points. TIA

[Scissor]

I don't run Diskeeper myself, but perhaps you can configure Diskeeper's autmatic defrag to exclude .VMDK files on your Host? I found this thread in the VMware 6.0 BETA forum where the poster exluded .VMDK files from Diskeeper. ( http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73399 ) . You might also want to exlcude .VMEM files as well.

If the above doesn't help, then perhaps your Guest's drives are fragmented. I would recommend the following procedure:

1. Inside your Guest, defragment its hard drives.

2. Inside your Guest, visit Control Panel -> VMware Tools -> Shrink tab -> Prepare to Shrink (note this process can take a very long time (1+ hour).

3. On your Host, defragment the .VMDK file (if necessary).

[kdshapiro]

I use Diskeeper on the host and inside VMs. All defragging is done offline to using VMs and I never have had any performance issues.