Virtual Quiz
 

Hi,
Virtualisation products are fantastic and I've been using various VMware products over the past few years. However, I always think I must be doing something wrong.
I've used VMWorkstation, VMplayer and, more recently VMServer. All on CentOS 4.6 64-bit with the installed guest OS on a XFS partition. The guest OS is Windows XP with 512M RAM.
My host is a AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 4600+ with 2G RAM but whenever I have more than one guest VM running the system slows to a CPU clock rate measured in days.
It is _slightly_ more usable if I have one VMware OS and one VirtualBox OS running, but it is still terribly painful. Reducing the guest RAM doesn't seem to matter either.
So, how do people claim to have so many guest OS's installed and running when I can't reasonably get past one?? What am I doing wrong?

TIA,
Steve

well I do not use vmware I use virtualbox....but I think you should not pay too much attention to what others claim but use your general knowledge.

xp varies it min ram required natively but I had it running on bros pc as xp pro and it was slow with 512 native....I had to go into cp and disable most of the services especially system restore and all the other crap.

so if you are running 2 or more guests gets uglier but the answer is the reverse of what you tried......add ram to guest vm pls

if you can get by with one guest give it 1G

Yep, I disable Indexing and System Restore on all partitions except C:

I tried to use VirtualBox but the apps I am running (Shavlik NetChk Pro to patch my network) didn't run very well (Something to do with DirectX)

Steve

You are saying the system slows to a crawl? The linux host slows to a crawl? Or only the virtual machines?

Who is sucking the processor? That is the place to start if you want to diagnose this sort of thing.

If you determine that VMWare is sucking the processor, then you need to go into your client OS(s) and run the task manager to see what Windows process is sucking the processor. Once you do this, you'll figure out what to do.

I run VMWare Workstation with up to 4 copies of Win2K at a time, and my 32 bit Linux host never slows down, though if I get the Windows installations busy things will indeed slow down.

The host OS (CentOS4.6) shows no sign of slowing, it is just the guests that act like their immersed in molasses.
On the VMServer install I run the Shavlik patching software (and that's all that is runnning according to sysinternals procexp) but in order to check the patch state on the second VM (running VirtualBox) I need to boot it and that can take a good 30mins - 1hour. And then another hour to run the patch check.
Both these machines are pretty recent XP SP2 reinstalls and have very little in the way of surplus sofware installed.

You might have the wrong hard drive driver installed. I had a problem a lot like that when I did an "upgrade" of my VMWare Workstation driver. The problem vanished when I reverted to the old driver.

Sorry, at this point I do not remember enough of the details to give more information. But it is a place to look.