Peter's Gekko

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(Dramatically) improving the performance of virtual (sp2) PC

To start with a disclaimer: I did not find this out myself. It was posted sometime last week on the dnj. I can't find it again, if anybody recognizes the post, please tell so. The guy needs a statue. May I repeat it ?

<Update>
The original post I read was by Jon Galloway on the asp.net blogs. Geoff had been pointing to it as well. That makes two statues. :>
</Update>

Virtual PC does have some overhead. But some of the last machines I created were sluggish inresponsive creatures. And they stayed like that regardless of the amount of RAM and processor resources they were given. These were virtual XP sp2 machines. The problem with them appeared to be the virtual machine additions. These improve interaction with the hosting OS and performance. Installing them is an option in the Virtual machine's menu.

Virtual PC has two related products, Virtual PC for the mac and now there is Virtual Server. The virtual hard disks created by the products are compatible. And so are the virtual machine additions. The additions coming with virtual server are an enormous improvement. They did magic to my virtual machines. An update of virtual PC will be out some time soon. For the moment you can upgrade you machines this way.

Download the virtual server trial
Part of the program installed is a Virtual Machine Additions folder
Load the ISO file found there in the CD drive of your virtual PC
Let the setup do its work
The setup will notify you it is upgrading the additions.

After resetiing the virtual machine it runs so much better. For an sp2 machine the results are no less than dramatic. Absolutely recomended.

Peter

Published Oct 04 2004, 02:18 PM by pvanooijen

Comments

Geoff Appleby said:

Do you mean my post, or did someone else beat me to it?

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/fredd/archive/2004/09/23/26544.aspx

# October 4, 2004 4:48 AM

Peter van 0oijen said:

It was Jon's post. So that's at least 3. Spread the word !

# October 4, 2004 5:27 AM

David Truxall said:

We have found that if you can put the virtual hard disk on a separate physical drive performance improves about 20-30%. We are all using external USB drives just for virtual machines.

# October 4, 2004 8:08 AM

Peter van 0oijen said:

Absolutely. The other nice thing about that is that you can host your virtual machine on different machines with different settings for the CPU and RAM. That works very well as long as you shut down the machine before changing the host (instead of saving the virtual machine's state). The virtual machine will restart from a saved state but after that it is literally a blue screen in a box :>

# October 4, 2004 10:21 AM

Marcus Tucker said:

"We are all using external USB drives just for virtual machines."

Isn't the latency (i.e. access times) rather high on external drives? Good for backup, yes, but running a virtual machine from? Surely not!

# October 7, 2004 8:26 AM

Peter van 0oijen said:

You must have missed something. Today's external USB 2.0 / FireWire drives outperform many an internal drive. Including access time. I've been doing all kinds of things with my external (http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/petergekko/archive/2004/05/11/13297.aspx), included spooling in complete Hi-8 video tapes. Without a glitch.

# October 7, 2004 9:55 AM