Improving VMWare Server performance on Windows XP

Over the last year, we have made a big push to move our development/test environments to a virtualized environment using VMWare Server. While we have not really encountered serious performance issues with our test servers, my team was reporting very poor performance with running the development virtual machines on their laptops. Now, keep in mind that these are pretty powerful laptops with 3 or 4GB of RAM, a T9300 dual-core processor, and a 7200RPM SATA hard drive. So there was more than enough horsepower to run WebSphere Portal in a virtual machine. However, the facts did not bear it out and in fact my team was reporting that running the virtual machine was in fact slowing their laptops down to a crawl with the constant hard disk access – a build that ought to take 5-10 seconds was taking several minutes. Obviously an unacceptable situation and people had reverted to just using a local WebSphere Portal install on their native OS – the issue with the local installs was that these local installs were not configured with LDAP or all the customizations/configurations that our test VMs have. When I found out about the issue and workaround and the fact that my pet initiative had fallen by the wayside, I felt challenged to resolve this issue. I tried it out on my own laptop and was able to reproduce this issue, and 2-3 hours later, I had the issue resolved.

My basic mis-steps with VMWare Server hardware/networking and their solutions

This is a quick blog about some start-up issues that I ran into with VMWare Server during my initial experimentation with it. I also go into the solutions for these issues.

Joining the virtualization party late but better late than never!

I have been hearing the virtualization buzz for a couple of years now, but have never really tried it. About a month back, I decided to give virtualization a whirl and downloaded the free version of VMWare – VMWare Server. VMware Server installs on a variety of operating systems including most flavors of Windows and Linux, partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines, and allows you to run Windows/Linux on these virtual machines. I currently have it installed on my Vista laptop and I love it – VMWare, not Vista just to be clear!