VMWare Workstation and HDD performance...

BEN_UK · 22 Apr 2014 at 21:41

Hi,

I've just started using vmware workstation 10 for hopefully creating my test environment.

I've got a mid spec desktop running windows 8.1 x64 with 8gb ram and i5 4th gen.

The hard drive is a single 1tb drive.

when I'm creating vm's and they are going through the install process the overall system performance is terrible. I can barley use the computer for anything else.

Is there anyway I can improve this poor performance ? should I be running the vm's on a separate partition or a totally separate disk ?

Thanks

OmegaHarvest · 22 Apr 2014 at 21:50

I used to have exactly the same performance issues. VMs can be very disk IO heavy. Either migrate them to a seperate disk or even better, stick them on an SSD (if you have the wonga).

Mujja · 22 Apr 2014 at 21:53

Buy a couple of SSDs.

I keep all the ISOs and WIMs I need on one SSD and install the VMs on the other. Takes a few mins to deploy each OS.

I used to waste too much time before waiting for changes and updates to apply.

Mujja · 22 Apr 2014 at 21:55

OmegaHarvest said:
stick them on an SSD (if you have the wonga).

250GB SSDs are around £100 now.

If I set aside 2-3 hours in a eve to study I'd waste half of it waiting for things to happen. Theinvestment in an SSD is worth the time saved.

OmegaHarvest · 22 Apr 2014 at 22:55

Mujja said:
250GB SSDs are around £100 now.

If I set aside 2-3 hours in a eve to study I'd waste half of it waiting for things to happen. The involvement in an SSD is worth the time saved.

Agreed. Since I stuck 2 in my homeserver I can spin up new installs of Server 2012 in les than 5mins in an ESXI VM.

Knubje · 23 Apr 2014 at 17:04

SSD on home lab is almost essential now a days, you will be severely bottle necked in operations per second available to a physical 7,200rpm disk. (100 iops at best).

Looking at the OcUK store, you can get a 240GB Crucial M500 for £90! Any SSD will boost performance massively!!

El Pew · 24 Apr 2014 at 12:12

Make sure you aren't giving your VMs too much RAM. If you have 8GB of RAM you shouldn't be spinning up VMs that use more than 4-6GB in total otherwise you'll see degraded performance on your host. More RAM on your host will allow you to run more VMs.

Definitely don't make the mistake of spinning up VMs that use more than 8GB or you'll experience massive performance loss until you kill some VMs.

An SSD will help but I used to run VMs on a 5400 laptop HDD with a Core2 Duo without seeing too much of the symptoms that you are.

Ev0 · 24 Apr 2014 at 13:30

I run a demo environment off a laptop with a single mechanical HDD and never had any issues with slow down, but probably a combination of 32 gig in the machine and some of the machines not being that resource intensive.

Talking a pfsense machine, a few windows and linux boxes running within.

Never had the machine slow down when creating a new machine either.