Recommendations for a host OS for VMware installation

[routerman]

My current vmware server runs on XP Pro, the PC is an AMD Athlon 64 2.6 gig, with 3 gig of ram, and its quite slow. Would I see an improvment in running on a different host OS, or is the hardware spec a bit on the low side?

This is not a production machine, its one for training purposes.

I've had a read through the info on the VMware site and dont see anything to indicate preferencies.

 

[SimonDavies]

Whats the pc like if you bench mark it using 3dmark or something similar?

In all honesty tho I would consider the CPU as the limiting factor (I have had issues in the past with non Intel processors not being upto the task).

SimonD.

The real world is not about exam scores, it's about ability.

 

[routerman]

Hi Simon,

Thanks, I'm working away at present so have not had a chance to check this.

Although I work in IT, I dont know much about this stuff, and have read recently that an x86 CPU cannot really use much more than 3.1Gb Ram. I want to use several guests on the VMWare server for training purposes, and was planning to install 4Gb RAM.

I was thinking that I may get better performance if I used say 2003 server or a Linux OS as the host rather than XP Pro, any thoughts?

Andy

 

[fernlyn]

Hi
The processor should be ok i run vm on less. You can allocate the guest more ram. The amount of ram you can use will depend on the mainboard however XP will use up to 4gig but there is a 2 gig limit on the page file size. There is way to get it to use a bigger page file with switch in boot.ini but that may be counter productive because the processor has to address the extra.
I would make sure you have the pagefile set to 2gig.
Generally tuning up the host machine can make a big diffrence like getting rid of background processes and use a light weight AV such as Avira AntiVir.
this post is a little belated but hope it is of use
Fern

 

[routerman]

Thanks Fern, I did increase the RAM to 3 gig, as I was told that is probably as much as XP could use. Also I'm sure the AV (AVG) was slowing things down, so removed it to try, depending on what the system was doing this may have improved performance a bit.

I loaded a pre-build VmWare image for Red hat enterprise, and that runs really well, when I looked at this again it seems that the only time I suffer poor performance is when building the guest OS, once loaded it runs pretty well.

I want to run a Cisco application, CS-MARS and so need a large disk (120gig), some I'm going to look at this again next time I'm home.

Andy

 

[TheLad]

I found it was better to run the host OS on a different disk (or in my case different RAID1 mirror) to the VMWare Server installation and VM locations.

Basically this means that the performance of VMWare Server does not drastically affect the performance of the guest OS. I was having disk I/O bottlenecks when the guest OS and VMWare Server installation shared the same disk (RAID1 mirror).

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