This post will get updated with VMWare Workstation optimization best practices I’ve come across.
Reference environment used for testing
IBM DS4500 (8TB of RAID 5 and RAID 1)
IBM BladeCenter Attached via dual path 2Gb Fibre Channel
- 2x Dual Core AMD 2200 processors
- 14GB RAM
- 70GB Local Mirrored Disk
Virtual Machine Disk Rules
- Each VM should reside on it’s own seperate disk
- Disk provisioned to the host should be provisioned across multiple arrays (internal arrays) spread across multiple controllers.
- If using basic disks perform storage alignment
- Never use Dynamic Disks to combine LUNs of a different size. This technique is known as LUN concatenation and will lead to significant disk performance issues. Disks created with this technique will show up as “spanned” disks.
- If you do choose to combine LUNs using Dynamic Disk always use LUNs of the same size. This will allow striping across all LUNs thus creating a “striped” disk.
Virtual Machine Host Server Memory Rules
32 bit OS – Memory Limit 32GB with PAE enabled
64 bit OS – Memory Limit 2TB
- Each processes limited by default to 2GB of memory. This can be extended to 3GB by setting the /3GB flag in the boot.ini file
Complete list of Windows Operating Systems and their respective memory limits: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx
Post Installation Tasks
Defragment everything…
- Internal VM disk
- VM disk (Edit VM -> Disk -> Utilities -> Defragment)
- Physical Disk (Computer Management -> Disk Manager -> Defragment Disk)
WORK IN PROGRESS>>>
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