- #VMWARE WORKSTATION PLAYER 12 VS VMWARE WORKSTATION 12 FREE#
- #VMWARE WORKSTATION PLAYER 12 VS VMWARE WORKSTATION 12 WINDOWS#
Striped RAID may help for faster VMDK access however, don’t expect miracles because random access is often not so much accelerated when you use RAID.
#VMWARE WORKSTATION PLAYER 12 VS VMWARE WORKSTATION 12 WINDOWS#
It’s best to isolate Windows on a separate hard disk. SSD is obviously much faster but keep in mind it has a much faster wear and tear compared to magnetic drives. You’d definitely want that turned off and your VSS will run clean and smooth. In VSSUIRUN.EXE you may find a scheduled shadow task that created shadows periodically. If you are using System Restore, turn it off completely. Don’t worry it’s not going to use disk space until a backup is run. Then, increase the VSS storage area using vssuirun.exe (on Windows Servers) or vssadmin and set all limits to unbounded: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=unboundedĭo the above optimization for all drives you have, especially the system drive and the drive containing the VMDKs. The command is: vssadmin delete shadows /all If you want the best performance you would definitely want to delete all VSS shadows on your system (provided you aren’t using a tool that needs them). A backup tool, however, is much better at that and without the performance penalty of VSS shadows. VSS is used internally in Windows to provide file versioning. Snapshots can also cause additional disk fragmentation, so you would want to consider whether the convenience is worth the performance impact. Unless you absolutely need snapshots, it’s time to delete them and turn off “auto-protect” which generates them automatically. They multiply the overhead required to perform a simple disk access and slow down reads as well as writes. Those are handy and unfortunately very inefficient at the same time. It’s best to remove snapshots, aka differencing disks.
#VMWARE WORKSTATION PLAYER 12 VS VMWARE WORKSTATION 12 FREE#
Drive access is likely to slow down significantly once free disk space falls below that and the potential for fragmentation is also much greater at that point. If you do not have the space to convert all VMDKs to fixed size, do at least some of them and ensure the host disk is at least 15% free. Naturally a defrag inside the VM is good, too, provided you have a preallocated VMDK to begin with. They will never need a defrag on the host again once they are set it place. The advantage is obvious: you only need to do this once. Then run a defrag on the host before powering them up again. Ideally you would want to go through all your VMDKs and convert them to preallocated disks. Now that the VMDK has been merged, change the VM’s settings and point to the merged file.īefore you boot up the VM it’s a good idea to run a defrag.ĭefragmentation of Virtual Disks and Host Disks is Importantįragmentation of dynamically growing virtual disks is a major issue on all virtualization platforms. By the way instead of -t 0 you could use -t 2 for a preallocated single disk, which is the best choice for perfomance. VMMERGED.VMDK is the new file, which will be created as a single, growable virtual disk. Where vmsplittest.vmdk is the VMDK file you have right now, which is split in 2GB files. You need to power off the VM and use a tool that ships with VMware Workstation.įrom the command prompt run the following command: "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe" -r vmsplittest.vmdk -t 0 vmmerged.vmdk Unfortunately merging those pieces afterwards requires downtime. Next time you create a new VM, choose ‘store virtual disk as a single file’ to avoid this issue. The screen looks like this when you create a new VM, note the default is set to ‘split”: File access in Windows, however, is much better optimized when you are dealing with one large fixed file instead of many interdependent small ones. This default setting is unfortunately not very useful from a performance perspective. This setting likely exists only because some file systems can’t handle extremely large file sizes. These steps will speed up and offer better performance, during normal operation but also during backups with your VMware backup software.įirst you would want to merge split VMDKs that VMware Workstation creates by default. This article describes a couple of quick steps to speed up VMware Workstation.
0 kommentar(er)
