Friday 26 March 2010

Improve performance of VMWare

For a while I am using VMware environments for SharePoint development projects. Last time, I was really struggling with performance issues. My host OS is Windows 7 (64-bit) with an Intel T7700 processor and 4 GB RAM. About every 10 minutes, the CPU of the virtual machine (Windows 2008 R2, 64-bit) was up to 100% caused by a variety of services (every time another one).
There are some improvements I have made which worked (at least) in my situation.
  • Configuration of the virus scanner.
    Exclude the VMware files from real-time protection and for the ThreatSense-engine
  • Add some parameters to the VMware configuration file (.vmx)
    - Disable page sharing (improves I/O). Add following line to the vmx-file:
    sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
    - If you have enough free RAM for all planned concurrent VMs, be sure to disable memory trimming for guest OSes adding the following line to the virtual machine configuration (.vmx) file:
    memTrimRate="0"
  • A really performance hitter for virtual machines is a fragmented host OS disk. Be sure to schedule a disk defragmentation on your host OS a regular basis (best: daily)
  • See more tips here.
By now, I am a bit more happy

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hallo Rob,

I found your name on Google. As we share the same surname, you may be interested in looking at the 'van Meeuwen' website, where I am attempting to connect the families.

Let me know if you find any relatives, or errors! I speak and read Dutch (just not very good at writing it).

Best wishes,

George van Meeuwen
www.vanmeeuwen.co.nz