Here's a great list of tips from my buddy J. Sawyer at MSFT.
Biggest perf tip is to put the VPC Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) to separate disk spindles from the operating system. The biggest perf issue with VPC is related to disk I/O … and by making the VPC fight with your OS and swap disk make this issue much, much worse. Additionally, today’s USB 2.0 and Firewire external hard drives run on a fast interface bus (Firewire does have some advantages over USB 2.0, but both are excellent), have a large (8MB) buffer and spin at 7200 RPM, as opposed to 4200 RPM for most laptop HDD. Also, note the tip below regarding “Run Virtual PC at Maximum Speed” … this will give a boost to the VPC’s thread priorities at the expense of the host OS applications. Depending on what you are using the VPC for, this may be exactly what you want. From a PPT Deck: Guidelines: Ideally Virtual PC performance is at: CPU: 96-97% of host Network: 70-90% of host Disk: 40-70% of host However this is only for optimized guest operating systems running typical loads for a single process The Virtual PC team’s aim is always to provide the fastest possible solution while not compromising compatibility While virtual machines are not slow – there is always the potential for an unusual application to cause performance issues Performance Tuning Guest Performance – Preferences Check “File … Options” Running guest in background: Enable “Run Virtual PC at Maximum Speed” Running a test on multiple guests: Enable “All running virtual machines get equal CPU time” Memory Host should have a minimum of 256MB, 512MB – 1024MB recommended More memory is recommended for running multiple virtual machines simultaneously Each guest should be allocated memory like it would on a physical machine Virtual machines cannot use paged memory on the host system Additional Disk Optimizations Virtual Hard Disk size Compress them Defrag guest Clear unused sectors ( Cipher, Eraser, etc.) DO NOT attempt this step on a differencing drive – it will expand the disk to maximum size and you cannot compact it. Compact using Virtual Disk Wizard Enable NTFS compression on host operating system Trades off performance for file size Virtual Hard Disk performance Place the .VHD files on separate spindle from host OS If using Undo or Differencing Disks, place them on an additional spindle
Biggest perf tip is to put the VPC Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) to separate disk spindles from the operating system. The biggest perf issue with VPC is related to disk I/O … and by making the VPC fight with your OS and swap disk make this issue much, much worse. Additionally, today’s USB 2.0 and Firewire external hard drives run on a fast interface bus (Firewire does have some advantages over USB 2.0, but both are excellent), have a large (8MB) buffer and spin at 7200 RPM, as opposed to 4200 RPM for most laptop HDD.
Also, note the tip below regarding “Run Virtual PC at Maximum Speed” … this will give a boost to the VPC’s thread priorities at the expense of the host OS applications. Depending on what you are using the VPC for, this may be exactly what you want.
From a PPT Deck:
Guidelines:
Performance Tuning
Additional Disk Optimizations
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