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I have a vmdk images of windows XP I run 2 different images on my laptop (one is server and one is client) they connect to 3rd server (physical) all are bridged connection. no problems there (odd thing is that the VMs from my laptop doesnt ping the laptop itself but can ping the remote server - server is connected to the same physical switch as the laptop).

My question is if i can make the images run faster, sometimes if they are heavy they get stuck. right now im using VM player 3.1.4. the .vmx file is configured with memsize = "1604" Can i put memsize manually to be 2000+ ? or it was declared by the person who created the image ? will it make any difference in the performance of the image?

My laptop is i5 with 8GB ram.

Kara
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ilansch
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2 Answers2

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You should be able to just go to 'Edit virtual machine settings' and then go to the 'Hardware' tab, then select memory and you should be able to increase it, no need to play around in the .vmx file. See this link for details.

However, more often than not, memory is not the real issue the virtual machines are running slow, especially on a laptop with a 5400RPM hard drive, the problem is that if you have your own native OS + 2 or more virtual OS'es accessing the disk, it won't be able to keep up with all the requests. If you start 'perfmon' (start-run-perfmon) and then force a situation where your VM's get slow, take a look at the performance monitor. Right click the graph screen, select 'add counters', then select 'Memory > Available MBytes' and 'Physical Disk > Avg. Disk Queue Length'. The graph will then show you how much RAM is available and how high the disk queue length is, the latter one should not be against the roof the whole time, spikes are normal but no longer than 5-10 seconds.

As for your ping/networking issue, can you post the output of an 'ipconfig /all' of both your laptop and VM?

Cheers

Alex
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  • i will check the physical disk load to see if this is the bottleneck. regarding to network the laptop ipconfig is at http://www.text-upload.com/read,3840789582812 the vm#1 &Vm#2 ipconfig is at http://www.text-upload.com/read,3840798425054 - from my computer i can ping each VM ip and get reply but if i send ping from the VM to the ip of computer i dont get answer. i dont really need solution for this but i wonder why its happening.. Thanks ! – ilansch Jun 21 '12 at 10:01
  • You IP configuration seems OK, if you can ping from one to the other but not the other way around, this would indicate that the firewall on your laptop is blocking the ping, this is standard behaviour on windows 7. See the link below on how to add an exception to allow ICMP (ping) messages throug the firewall. http://www.sysprobs.com/enable-ping-reply-windows-7 – Alex Jun 21 '12 at 11:01
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The memsize determines the memory of the virtual machine. It should be easy to configure that form the VM machines settings. You can put whatever value you want (it should be a multiple of 4 and less than your total mem of course) and generally speaking this could increase the virtual image performance.

It really depends what runs on those images. I would suggest to just go through the minimum and recommended requirements of the software you run on the images and do the simple math, than adjust your memsize. If I were you, I would not relocate more than 4GB of total for the VMWare player.

hovanessyan
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