Ed Bott's Microsoft Challenge--2/15/00

1. Use a RAID subsystem with the VMs on a separate physical drive from the host OS. If possible, run the most intensive VMs (W2K Server, for example) on their own drives.

2. Use plain or raw disks for the VMs rather than virtual disks. In addition to gaining performance, you'll also overcome the 2Gb limit on virtual disks.

3. A least 128M of RAM for the host and another 64-128 for each concurrent VM, depending on the guest OS.

Well..the best tip for optimising VMWare is running it under Linux. Have used if for some time now (on Win2k and Suse Linux)and is posseled over the devastating difference in speed running VMWare on these two different platforms. Even my Win2k seemsto run faster inside an VMWare session on Linux than it seems to do by itself. probably just my senses running wild, but i've started to use Linux as my main OS and Win2k as my second even at work, where there is no Linux support in the network at all.

In Linux i have had up to 5 VMWare sessions going with out any troble, while in Win2k the systems comes to a hault when i try to start the third.

Uses VMWare to test customer programs on different plattform, and gets a lot of weird questions...

Ed,
Weve ben trying out VMware and had the same problems you. The only solution we found was to fill the machine up with memory. It made the set-up some what costly, so we haven't pursued it anymore.
Colin

You can allocate more memory to a particular Virtual Machines if you go under Settings - Configuration Manager. This helps.

Jason

The best way to increase VM Wares speed is to give it a box whivh has plenty of memory, spare more memory and don't forget to add in the memory!

Remember that VM Ware shares 'real' memory out between the virtual machine and the host machine it's running on. If your host PC only has 128mb of memory and you try to run something like Windows 2000 server and allocated it only 64mb then both machines will slow right down.

Give VM Ware plenty of memory to use.
Only have ONE Virtual machine running on the host at a time.
You can performance tune the host in terms of swap file and temp space just as you would a real world machine, A lot of people seem to forget this.

--
Gary Williams

It really depends on which OS you're running.. I've gotten BEos 5 to run, and redhat, along with all the MS OS' under VMware in NT4 and 2K server. Below in order are the things that I've found to make a huge difference.

1. Disk. Use a real disk, and not a virtual disk, this inreases performance by about 1/3.

2. RAM. I haven't used VMware in a machine with under 384MB of RAM. The performance increase point seems to be at about 80MB. There's a huge jump there. Not sure why... Seems mostuseful with Linux.

3. If you're using linux remember to set the swap size to double the size of your RAM. If you're doing a normal or VMware install it's still important. This is also why it's better to use a physical drive.

4. Under 2K use DirectDraw... although there's a warning it's much faster.

5. If you're going to use a *nix OS let's be serious and remember XWin is for slackers. You can't rely on config otools to do tasks for you... running Xwin is sooooo not important.

6. Just remember it's a virtual machine, no matter how fast you want it to go, it's not going to be that fast.