A Portal to a Portal

Was still suffering from major performance problems using a variety of VMs on VMware Workstation 5.5.3 and VMware Server 1.0.1 ( using VMs created for Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Professional ).

In all cases, the overall responsiveness of the VM was absolutely abysmal, even when running with 2 GB ( in the VM ) on an 8-way server with 16 GB RAM ( running W2K3 as a host OS ).

After some serious Googling, it turned out to be a setting in the .vmx file ( same directory as the actual VM image ).

Simply by adding: -

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

and physically restarting the VM ( actually shutting down the guest OS, and stopping/starting the VMware session ), the performance seemed to improve drastically.

This, combined with VMware Converter ( as blogg'd about previously ) allowed me to take a demo deployed on a native WinXP OS, convert it to a VM and then run it as a guest on the same machine that used to host it full-time.

As far as I can establish, this setting prevents the guest OS from paging its memory back to the host OS' disk. What's wierd is that I'd allocated 2+ GB to the VM, and Task Mangler didn't imply that memory was short but ..................

Remember kids, ymmv

:)