My small company currently does a lot of development work with VMWare workstation. Often, they'll run two dev VM's at once. I understand there are many bottlenecks for VMWare, one of which is I/O. As it is, we deploy strictly dell laptops. Currently we're running D820's, which are Core Duo and also have 2gb of RAM in them. We've been considering a number of things to boost performance as right now these relatively powerful laptops will often slow to a crawl with two dev VM's running in paralell.
First, due to the sheer numbers of VM's the developers maintain for testing and development, they are usually required to store and run these images off of external hard drives. As it is, we're running USB2 external hard drives(7200rpm). I'm wondering if utilizing something lightly IO intensive over the USB2 bus isn't causing a big hit in performance. After all, the bus is only so wide and, from my experience anyway, seems to have some CPU overhead. Has anyone out there tried eSATA? Our dell machines have Express card slots and I bought a SIIG eSATA express card. Couple that with a western digital My Book Premiuim ES Edition, and it looks promising. The verdict is still out on performance though as we just got a pilot setup running today... Has anyone tried this out yet? Is the external drive really even a bottleneck when considering the 2gb of ram or 2ghz core duo cpu in the equation?
Second, we're considering dropping more RAM in the machines to see if that alleviates the problem since ram prices have recently dropped massively. 4gb(2 x 2gb) of memory is definitely doable now. If two windows 2003 VM's each have 640mb for Visual Studio development, do you suppose doubling that would help a whole lot?
Finally, we've been looking at using Invirtus VM Optimizer. Does this software truly help boost performance in anyone's experience? It's primary benefit seems to be shrinking the virtual drive size. Size isn't really the concern when we're talking about using 300gb external drives for 20gb developer component loaded images anyway.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Chris
