Incredibly Slow VM

hellarda

hellarda

hellarda

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Morning

Following on from this thread I have decided to try and virtualise WHS to make it easier for me to reset it up if and when stuff goes wrong :)

So what I have atm is:

WHS v1 installed on the bare metal, specs:

Q6600
4gb RAM
9600gt
etc

it is installed on the two 2tb hdd's that I have in there, I have then installed Vmware workstation and have installed WHS 2011 to the data drive of the host (whs v1)

However the WHS 2011 install is running INCREDIBLY slowly (e.g it takes about 30 seconds to open the start menu after I click it) I have tried accesing it both directly from vmware and through RDP - still slow.

So how can I speed it up? I have assigned 2gb of Ram to it and 4 cores of the processor so its not got that bad specs.

Is there anything I can do? I have noticed that the disk usage is constantly >80%, is it because I have installed the VM on the data drive which is being accessed by whs v1?

cheers
 
m4cc45 said:
I'd reinstall the tools again. The tools / drivers are paramount to getting a good VM experience.


M.
Click to expand...

ok thanks I will and will see if that helps.

One more quick question: On my physical machine I have 2 Nics. Now I can work out how to assign the Vm to one of them, but how do I get the host OS to only use 1 NIC

i.e. So i would have the VM using 1 Nic and the host using the other?

this is a screenshot of how the vm network in workstation is configured:



So I would want the HOST to use Nvidia Networking Controller #1



cheers
 
Do you mean host as in the VM or do you mean host as in Windows PC?

If it's the VM then you configure it, as you have done, and it will only present the one NIC accross it won't present two NIC's unless you edit the Virtual Hardware and add a NIC.



M.
 
m4cc45 said:
Do you mean host as in the VM or do you mean host as in Windows PC?

If it's the VM then you configure it, as you have done, and it will only present the one NIC accross it won't present two NIC's unless you edit the Virtual Hardware and add a NIC.



M.
Click to expand...

I mean the host as in the windows pc that the vm is running on

So I'd want it to work something like this:

WHS v1 (host, NOT virtual) ------> Nvidia Networking Controller #1 ONLY

WHS 2011 (Virtual machine) -----> Nvidia Networking Controller #2 ONLY

SO I basically want the VM to have exclusivity to the Nvidia Networking Controller #2 and the host (as in not the VM) to have exclusivity to Nvidia Networking Controller #1

sorry If I didn't make that clear :)

thanks
 
I'm Also getting incredibly low network speeds to the VM (<1megabyte a second)

any ideas why? everything is connected by gigabit ethernet
 
Reduce the CPU count to 1. You're host OS only has 4 cores and you've assigned 4 cores to the guest OS instance. You have CPU contention already, by a single VM. Reduce it to 1vCPU 1Core and you'll see improved speed.
 
WHS v1 is 32 bit.
WHS 2011 is 64 bit.

I'm surprised that it's even installed, let alone running, unless VMware is doing something funky and emulating the x64 bit stuff - which might explain the slowness (although I thought that if you didn't have an x64 host you couldn't run an x64 guest...)
 
Confused said:
WHS v1 is 32 bit.
WHS 2011 is 64 bit.

I'm surprised that it's even installed, let alone running, unless VMware is doing something funky and emulating the x64 bit stuff - which might explain the slowness (although I thought that if you didn't have an x64 host you couldn't run an x64 guest...)
Click to expand...

Yep that's what I thought was the case, but I did a a bit of googling and it seems that along as you have 64bit hardware you should be able to run a 64bit guest on a 32bit host... Which you clearly can :) seems to have sped up after reinstalling and only allocating 1vcpu and allocating all the disk space at the start.

Still trying to work out how to assign the nics to have exclusively to the host or guest...
 
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