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Question for anyone using VMware

I use VMWare to run Linux(guest) off my Windows XP(Host) installation.

Currently I don't have any physical NICs installed so I use,the virtual NICs that VMware installs. However this takes a lot of my system resources, because VMWare itself is a resource hog.

My question is whether I could use two physical NICs in place of the virtual NICs, so that I could lower system resource usage.
 
Yes, I want to network the Linux with the Windows.

I am currently running Samba on the Linux guest, and accessing it from windows, but as I mentioned above I use the virtual NICs, to do Host-only networking.
 
You have to realize you're running a complete other OS inside VMWare, there's no way you can not make it a resource hog. And even if you put in a real NIC you have to use the VMWare ones.

If you really want to use it, I would suggest a better box to run it on, especially get a lot of memory.
 
Put some more ram in the machine, I run a gig here so I can run two VMWare instances at a time. Each instance gets its own 256mb, I don't need them to have any more. Also, make sure your rig has some power to it, the faster the thing is, the better VMWare will run.

Other than that, you can put another nic in, but it won't change much, VMWare is what is slowing the machine down.
 
Originally posted by: Nothinman
You have to realize you're running a complete other OS inside VMWare, there's no way you can not make it a resource hog. And even if you put in a real NIC you have to use the VMWare ones.

If you really want to use it, I would suggest a better box to run it on, especially get a lot of memory.

Nothinman is right. I think you still have to use the VMWare NIC. Add some RAM to the system and you will probably notice a big difference.
 
if you're running an smp rig, can you set vmware to use only of the processors? perhaps that may help take off the load and the lag a bit.

 
I once ran VMware 1.0 on a P233/96. 🙂

In general, a guest OS runs at roughly 2/3 the performance of a native OS on that machine, if you have enough system RAM to accomodate the guest(s). Legacy Winblows operating systems with 16-bit code (i.e. W 9x) run noticeably slower though.

With PCs as fast as they are today, VMware works quite well on typical systems, with a lot of RAM.

My light experience with VMware networking is that virtual networking in itself is not a resource hog.
 
I'm not sure about in Windows, but VMWare in Linux uses multiple processes for disk I/O so you can't keep it affine to one processor. Even if you could it would probably hurt performance atleast in the VMWare session more than helping the host session anyway.

I have a SMP 1.2Ghz Athlon box with 1.2G memory and I don't even notice VMWare running, sometimes I forget when I boot it =)
 
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