artykul8

I have been using VMware virtualization for quite a few years now, and even though it is generally fast and reliable platform, it does require some extra tuning to improve its performance. Here is a brief collection of tweaks that I personally use on Windows and Mac to speed up and improve I/O performance of VMware virtual machines. These tweaks have become particularly useful in the past couple of years, since larger amount of available RAM on computers and desire to reduce unnecessary write operations to SSD drives, such as full memory swap files.

Tweak: Disable memory swap files .vmem files

In the VMware settings.ini file add the following line:

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"


Settings.ini file is located file either at C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\ or C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Workstation\ folders, depending on your operating system.

Note: Unfortunately this parameter does not work for VMware Player, as it always creates virtual machine’s full memory swap file.

For VMware Fusion on Mac and Linux instead of mainMem.useNamedFile you have to set mainMem.backing flag.
VMware Fusion Config files are located at: /Users/username/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/preferences and /Users/username/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/config

mainMem.backing = "swap"


Tweak: Disable log files for VM
Open your .vmx file in a text editor and add the following line:

logging = "FALSE"


Alternatively you can specify a different location to store the log file, if you ever need them:

log.filename = "c:\Windows\Temp\vm1.log"


Tweak: Disk & Memory I/O Performance Optimization

Disable memory trimming:
MemTrimRate = "0"

Disable page sharing:
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

Disable snapshots if you are not using them and prefer full backups:
snapshot.disabled = "TRUE"

Disable scale down of memory allocation:
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"

Tweak: Disable Unity Mode

Unity might be a great feature for running virtual desktops operating systems, but it is not the most useful for virtualizing server OS. As a sign of enabled unity is presence of GuestAppsCache folder with a large number of files in its appData-subfolder. In order to disable it for your VM, open your .vmx file in a text editor and add the following line:

unity.allowCompositingInGuest="TRUE"

References:

VMware: Troubleshooting hosted disk I/O performance problems
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008885

VMware: Disk I/O Performance Tips
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_performance_diskio.html

VMware: Defragmentation overview
http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/10/tip-defragmenta.html

VMware: Disabling the Workstation Log File or Storing the Log File in a Different Location
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1028

Blog: How can I prevent VMware Workstation Unity Mode from disabling Windows Aero?
http://www.windowsitpro.com/article/virtualization2/q-how-can-i-prevent-vmware-workstation-unity-mode-from-disabling-windows-aero-

Having recently replaced OS partition hard-drives with solid-state drives on my desktop and two laptops, I decided to tweak a few settings on my Windows in order to reduce the number of unnecessary write operations to SSD. Amongst the candidates for the move from more expensive SSD space to spinning hard-drives, I selected temporary Windows folder and browsers cache folders. Moving temporary Windows folder turned out to be one step operation – changing Environment variables in Computer – Advanced system settings dialog.

However, after this quick success moving my browsers cache away from SSD turned out to be not the most trivial task due to a large number of different browsers and their very different approach to storing configuration settings. Here is my experience and instructions on how to do it in various browsers.

Internet Explorer:

IE offers the easiest and most convenient way to change a new folder for cache.

Tools – Internet Options – under ‘Browsing History’ section choose ‘Settings’
Click ‘Move folder…’ and provide the new location, e.g. d:\Temp\IE

Heads up: After providing a new temp folder and clicking OK to save new settings, IE/Windows forcefully closes current user session, and logs the user off.

Firefox:

In the URL type: about:config
Create a new string preference: browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
and specify a path to your cache folder, e.g.: d:\Temp\Firefox

Mozilla Zine: Browser.cache.disk.parent directory

Chrome:

The only way to change location of the cache folder is through the command prompt arguments:
C:\…\Application\chrome.exe –disk-cache-dir=”d:\Temp\Chrome” –disk-cache-size=75000000

Where –disk-cache-dir points to your custom cache folder, and –disk-cache-size specifies the maximum cache size in bytes.

Here is a full list of Chrome’s command line switcheshttp://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/chrome/common/chrome_switches.cc. Surprisingly, source code seems to be the only official documentation from Google. A brief blog post on the same topic: http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/.

Additionally, Chrome doesn’t expose that parameter in its configuration settings in a fashion similar to FireFox. If you navigate to about:flags in the Chrome, it provides some under the hood settings, but no cache configuration.

How to Turn On/ Disable GPU Hardware Acceleration on Google Chrome.

PS: Another useful command for Chrome, which reduces its memory footprint: –process-per-site. This command allows Chrome to run tabs from the same domain in the same process, thus reducing number of spun out processes and memory use, while still offering process isolation. http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/process-models.

Opera:

Review the location of the current cache folder by typing in the URL: opera:about or from Menu – Help – About Opera.

To modify the settings type the URL: opera:config

Navigate to “User Prefs” tab and modify its cache folder: Cache Directory4 =d:\Temp\Opera\
(alternative quick jump link: opera:config#UserPrefs|CacheDirectory4)

Additionally you can modify temporary download folder for Opera as well, through another key:
Temporary Download Directory = d:\Temp\Opera

Opera’s Settings File Explained

Safari:

Safari unfortunately does not provide any way to change the location of its cache directory, just like it does not provide any way to change its advanced settings in a comprehensive way.

about URI scheme

If you are trying to delete GTP or EFI partition on your hard drive under Windows Server 2008/7/Vista using management console are you out of luck. However, here is the easiest way to get around it:

Start command prompt and run diskpart.exe in command prompt issuing these commands as per illustration below:
d:\path>diskpart.exe
DISKPART> list disk
DISKPART> select disk x
DISKPART> clean

Please note, the reason for using ‘clean’ command instead of ‘delete volume’ is that ‘delete volume’ crashes diskpart utility when attempting to delete GTP/EFI partitions. Also outdated diskpar.exe utilitiy, which is frequently used for aligning physical partitions and is still quite popular for SSD optimization, cannot even read disk layout containing GTP or EFI partitions.

Great post: How to Delete GPT Partition or EFI from Mac Hard Disks In Vista or XP
Reference: A Description of the Diskpart Command-Line Utility
Diskpar & Diskpart in server environment: Disk Partitioning Offset
Disk partitioning Alignment: Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices for SQL Server
SSD Optimization guide: OCZ Technology Forum

Being an old fan of VMware products (in particular, the fact that I can run VMware VMs on my MacBook, as well as on Wintel desktop), I found myself utterly disappointed this week, when I tried to convert my physical Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 into a virtual instance.

The latest version of VMware Converter kept crashing on me at the start of the conversion process with the error: “Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume(s).”
More disappointingly, even according to press releases VMware vCenter Converter – the latest and greatest version of VMware Converter, officially doesn’t support Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 editions (its latest version at the moment is 4.0.1 and dated 2009-12-08).

After a few failed attempts with VMware, I decided to look at Microsoft offerings. Even though, I couldn’t find an official Microsoft converter product, I found something better – a Sysinternals utility Disk2vhd, which can create a virtual hard disk (VHD) out of running physical image.

The most impressive part that the whole process of converting my running 60G RAID-0 hard drive array took only a couple of minutes, with minimal configuration effort – no heavy installation or complex user-interface interactions. All I had to do is select a check box with the volume(s), which needs to be converted and that’s it. Systinternals delivered an impressive utility once again! Kudos to Microsoft for keeping Sysinternals brand alive and bringing new useful tools.

Links:

• Sysinternals
• Mark Russinovich’s Blog
• Download Disk2vhd
• Run Disk2vhd from Live.Sysinternals.com