I have installed Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 on a VM in VMWare Workstation. I RDP to this VM/sever via Vista (my host OS) but the performance of the server is a little choppy. It is usable but could be better.
My specs: 4GB RAM, Quad Core Pentium 2.4ghz
VM settings: 2880mb ram dedicated (max recommended is 2992mb),
I have noticed that the disk queue length is peaking quite a bit.hard disk is preallocate.
I have set hardware acceleration to full in Windows Server and turned off the firewall (These two things really improved performance but I will need the firewall).
The VM only has SQL Server Installation Center on it (due to a failed install, another story). How can I improve the performance of Windows (I know how to improve the VM's performance which is another story)?
Especially when I run an installer, the whole OS locks up. My host OS does not do this.
Thanks
Best Answer
The first thing I would check would be how much is the Host OS paging - I would imagine quite a bit since you have nearly 3/4 of the RAM for the machine allocated to the VM. If the Host OS is paging alot that will thrash the disk, which will slow everything down especially the VM. The only two options at that point would be to reduce the RAM allocation to the VM or add more RAM to the system. A stopgap as others have said is to move the VM to a seperate disk, but you will still see bad performance as long as the system is RAM starved. As a rule of thumb with non hypervisor virtulization systems I never allocate more that 1/2 the physical memory to VM usage.