Oracle DRM Blog

02 Oct, 2008

VMWare: How to Optimize for Performance

Posted by: Daniel In: Tips 'n' Tricks

VMWare is a great technology where your one single PC can be virtualize into many, or run multiple OS, and a mix and match of these. Imagine your XP machine running Vista, Windows 2003 Server, and other hybrids like XP Media Edition without re-installing your machine from scratch. Now imagine you can run any one of these whenever you feel like needing it. It’s very simple yet powerful concept. I’s the concept of virtualization…

I have been playing with VMWare for over a year and it has helped me tremendously testing various technology. With my Quad Core system, it’s blazingly fast. Still, over time, the systems get very big — like installing Oracle Hyperion EPM 11.1.1. How often do we hear about complain on VMWare Slow Disk, VMWare Optimization, VMWare boost performance? Alot!!!

One of the most important tip I learnt is ensuring the disk is in good shape. It maybe painful but defraging your virtual OS’s hard disk is important. But the catch is you must do this in a number of steps:

1. Defrag your virtual OS hard disk using the native Disk Defragmenter under Start | Accessories | System Tools

2. Next is using VMWare’s defrag tool under VM | Settings | Hardware | Hard Disk | Utilities | Defrag

3. Finally you need to do it on the host’s machine (the real OS not virtual) Disk Defragmenter.

These can take a long time to do but if you don’t it’ll be slow and you can see it when the CPU is not doing anything and yet the machine is halting. Also do the defrag before you do a snapshot because un-defragged disk are carried forward to the next snapshot (in VMWare Workstation).

There’s a couple of good resources online and I just want to share them here with you:

Enjoy!!!

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2 Responses to "VMWare: How to Optimize for Performance"

1 | Julie

March 3rd, 2010 at 12:47 pm

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We will be upgrading to 11.1.1.? later and I am interested in utilizing VM where I can. My initial thought is that Essbase needs to be on a physical server, but reports, Planning, Shared services can reside on one VM server? Interested in your experience with Hyperion and VM.

2 | Daniel

March 3rd, 2010 at 1:35 pm

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Julie, I think what you said would be fine. Essbase can also be on an VM but I guess you are looking for best performance. We have installed any of the components on both VMs or physical servers. As long as the server has enough power, you can even put VM on the same box as Essbase and put that on top of the physical OS. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,
Daniel Poon

Comment Form


  • Daniel: Ravi, yes there're a couple of properties needed for Essbase. If you are using v11 DRM, you should have the templates available already. Just check it
  • Daniel: Hi Tonia, use 9.3.1 add-in and it'll work fine unless you absolutely need version 11 features. In that case, we maybe able to help offline. Regards,
  • Daniel: There isn't any documentation as such from version 8. The DRM database structure is very different, you will have to rebuild it. Shouldn't be too hard

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