Oracle DRM Blog

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:

• I need more performance out of my VMware environment 
• Citrix on VMware Recommendations
• VMWare Workstation Performance Tuning

Enjoy!!!