Win7 and VMware Workstation on SSD

wiglet

wiglet

wiglet

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Joined
20 Sep 2011
Posts
26
Hello!

I run VMware workstation on my pc with a couple of vms (for lab testing), however find that quite often performance is very slow. I think the bottleneck is the back end storage. So, I'm considering getting a Samsung 840 SSD to help with this.

I've not used SSDs before so need someone to clarify for me -

Would you install both the OS, VMware Workstation and VM datastores on the same SSD OR leave the OS and workstation on its own slower SATAIII drive and just put the vm datastores to SSD?

Thanks!
 
Put everything on the SSD and you'll notice much better performance. The key thing with VMs is the disk access to the VMDK (virtual disk) and VMEM (virtual memory, basically the RAM) files, which will obviously be a lot better with an SSD. You might also want to make sure you have enough RAM for both your OS and the VMs - if you don't you get loads of disk swapping.

I went from running everything on a 320GB 5.4k laptop HDD to a 128GB SSD and the difference was amazing, especially since I was running stuff heavily based on SQL databases. The only annoying thing is the reduced amount of space, which means I can realistically only keep 1 VM at a time on the SSD, but then I have my old drive as a data dump.
 
Thanks for the reply! I guess I just wanted to make sure by placing both the OS and the datastores on the SSD that I was going to create a bottleneck there. I wouldnt be doing any SQL stuff, just running a small lab but need it to be nippy enough!

Cheers for the advice!
 
yes SSD will help, but more importantly, how big your memory is? vmware rely on RAM more anything else. so more memory the better.
 
i'd put the OS on the SSD and try running vmware on the mechanical disk first. you might find it's more than adequate as you're not doing anything heavy duty. i'm stuck on a mechanical OS disk myself and sticking my vmware images on another physical disk made a huge improvement compared to running both off the same drive.
 
grand so. to be honest i think i'll probably end up trying a few different combinations. The OS will definitely sit on the SSD anyway, and I can always move the vmdks back and forth between the SSD and a mechanical drive to see what the difference is. My gut feeling is it will be better on the SSD, but we'll see.

RAM-wise, I have 8gb at the moment but will probably bump it up to 16gb for the purposes of the lab.
 
wiglet said:
Thanks for the reply! I guess I just wanted to make sure by placing both the OS and the datastores on the SSD that I was going to create a bottleneck there. I wouldnt be doing any SQL stuff, just running a small lab but need it to be nippy enough!

Cheers for the advice!
Click to expand...

Hi Wiglet, how much memory was used to set up here? Was 8GB enough for you here?
 
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