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[|DRC| psycheus]

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/270972

I'm having problems with the HDD constantly cycling. It's very annoying.

VMWare Workstation 7.1: HDD Constantly Cycling posted: Jun 3, 2010 10:05 AM

Hello,

I've been using VMWare workstation for about 8 months now and like it very much. However there is something that has been bothering me about the HDD IO and performance. The HDD is constantly cycling ever 2 out of 3 seconds. I'm guessing this isn't going to make this HDD last very long but I also want to improve the performace of my VM. Here's where I'm at..

System: Dell Laptop Lattitude D830 w/ 4 GB Ram (only 3.5 register in Windows 32 Bit), 500 GB 7200 RPM HDD, Running Windows XP SP3 (Host & Guest).
Memory Allocation: 1536 to VM.

Host System: Turned off all unnecessary Windows stuff like effects, system restore tried optimizing the pagefile. Disabled services that are unessasary

VM (Guest OS) System: I always run in full screen mode. The VM is on a separate partition of the HDD (D: drive.). Also turned off memory trimming, page sharing, disabled file sharing, added VMWare to Avast AV Software to not scan (on host), there is no AV on VM. Shrank the VM HDD.

Here are some links of info I found:
http://virtualization.info/en/news/2005/11/how-to-improve-disk-io-performances.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws4/doc/performance_guest_ws.html#1012581
http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_disk_shrink.html

The wierd part is even when I'm not doing anything on either host or VM it keeps cycling. What should I try next?? I'm open to suggestion. I use this VMWare workstation for HVAC DDC Programming where we use many different pieces of software that don't work together and is why we went the VM route. I have a total of 6 VM for various software but I use the VM listed above everyday.

Thanks,

--
Rick

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[|DRC| Wartex]

psy do u mean cycling as power on-off or just reading/writing shit?

if latter, look up filemon / diskmon utilities, they show what files are being accessed and by what process (for win xp)
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[|DRC| psycheus]

No I mean reading constantly.. sorry. Do you have any monitoring programs you recommend that I could try? Thanks!

Something else that came up I forgot to mention I turned off is the CD drive (so it doesn't automatically connect at time of VM startup)

[|DRC| Blackshark]

are you bound to VMWare or is it your tool of choice?

[|DRC| Wartex]

|DRC| Wartex wrote:

---

, look up filemon / diskmon utilities, they show what files are being accessed and by what process (for win xp)

pay attention

[|DRC| psycheus]

The VM seems to be running better since I turned off the file sharing. Didn't realize it made such a difference.

Blackshark what else is there out there? I've heard of VMware, MS Virtual PC and Virtual Box. I've only tried using VMware and MS Virtual PC and VMware is much nicer to use. I've already setup 6 VM's and we have 5 computers running VMware workstation and at $200/copy it wasn't cheap. We use it for HVAC Programming software that doesn't work on the same computer. The reason we are using VMware in particular is we need the bluetooth drivers for a tool that we use for Johnson Metasys.

[|DRC| Blackshark]

Well you really should give www.virtualbox.org a try. I am using it for about 3 years now and its a fantastic piece of software and very stable if i may say so. I do not know about special drivers but you can pipe lots of drivers from the host system and they support opengl and direct3d hardware acceleration since the last major release. And the best thing is it is free and open source. Lets hope Oracle won't break it in future.

[|DRC| psycheus]

Do you know if I can use my existing VMware VM's on the Virtual Box?

[|DRC| Blackshark]

i did a quick search and found this. it is an quite old article but thats even more reason to believe they imrpoved vmware image imports

http://www.ende-der-vernunft.org/2008/03/22/howto-convert-from-vmware-to-virtualbox/