Best Practice for Settings in Template

[LM_Chris]

I am wondering what the best settings for my Windows 2003/XP templates should be in terms of memory and CPU. I have the 2003/XP "Hardware Tab" set to 2GB and usage of both CPUs. I have read some other threads and articles about some of the settings but am still confused. Should I be checking "Unlimited" under the "Resources Tab"?

[ExCon]

It really just depends on the "normal" setup in your environment. You can have templates for different types of machines that you typically deploy, different settings, etc. If you have pretty generic stuff though, I'd probably just leave the memory at 1024MB and definitely make it one CPU. You can always change the memory after deploying, but if you expect to use dual CPU VMs I'd go ahead and make two different templates for that (personally.)

[spex · Accepted solution]

Keep things small.

You can easily add cpu and ram. (Only take care of your swap file size. )

You can maintain even a small c: drive and expand later, if you don't care about some extra - good documented work.

The step from multicore hal to single core is possible - but complicated. So better use single cpu templates.

If you have to change things within your template (e.g. new SP) the less you have the easier your life is.

Regards

Spex

[LM_Chris]

Thanks for the help. I made my original 2003 template with two processors. Nothing is really installed aside from Windows patches and AV. The ESX box is a dual processor 3.GHz Xeon, think going from 2 to 1 will cause problems in the future? I changed it from two to 1 and didn't have problems; but I don't want something to pop up later down the road.

[VAs_RHD_Hachi_R]

Spex I was curious what you meant by swap files size.

www.ectoyotas.com

[spex]

If you adjust the ram size of your vm, you also have to adjust your swapfile size.

Min recommended ist swap=ram+1MByte.

There is a small script from MS within windows2003 installation to automate that.

Don't remember the name...

Regards Spex