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Running Multiple VMs... at a snail's pace?

Ketchup

Ketchup

Elite Member
I would really love it if you folks find something I am missing here.

The work laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad with an i7, 8 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive.

The problem: I cannot run Windows 7 and the two VMs without huge slowdowns. One at a time is fine.

I not only use this at work, but it is about the only computer I use when I am on call, so in addition to a work VM, I also run a "personal" VM for my own things (like posting here).

One of the VMs is Windows 7, which a couple of us just put together to replace XP, for one of our customers. They require a VPN that only lets us access their network.

With my VM I am trying to run Vista (XP is just looking way too old and vista would seem to be more power efficient). The problem is if I run them at the same time, everything goes to a crawl, the hard drive light solid.

So, here are some details:
-I have three partitions: one for the host system and one for each VM
-I have stripped both down: many services off, defender off, no antivirus, system restore off, etc.
-Checking fragmentation with Auslogics disk defrag. For some reson, they do fragment quite easily on the "real" drive. Not tons of fragments, but even a degragment doesn't help much.
-I have tried setting the vhd as Ione large file and several small files. The single file does seem to operate better, so I have started to just use that.
-The guest systems each have 2 GB of RAM. Theyshow that they have plenty free, and the host, with high usage as Windows 7 does, still has a good gig of free memory always.


So I have two questions:
1. Is there anything besides the obvious (need an SSD drive) that would help here?
2. Why would these be thrashing the hard drive if nothing is pegging the RAM or fighting over the same space?
 
Just curious are you running the latest version of Oracle Virtual box? and could you borrow enough RAM to up your machine to 16 GB for testing?
 
It's not RAM. It's the HDD.

Windows is constantly hitting the hard drive for little odds and ends type stuff, even idle. A typical (slow) 7200 rpm HDD can handle one copy of windows. Two is marginal. Three is torture.

Get an SSD.
 
Can also try increasing the ram allocated to the Win7 Vm more than 2G
and lesson the ram allocated to Vista

or set both VM's paging file size to zero and maybe you will get a message from one of them announcing it is starved for memory
so increase the memory allocated to that one.
 
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KillerBee said:
or set both VM's paging file size to zero and maybe you will get a message from one of them announcing it is starved for memory
so increase the memory allocated to that one.
Click to expand...

I was thinking about that this morning. Thanks for you all the ideas folks, I will leave you hanging (I mean keep you posted (I swear that's what I meant, lol!)).
 
My work laptop has 16 GB of RAM and I was unable to run 2 VMs without really killing performance. It was very likely because of drive performance. In my case, I have several VMs I use for testing and accessing customer networks, so I moved them to my own Hyper V server and everything is so much better. 🙂
 
KillerBee said:
...or set both VM's paging file size to zero and maybe you will get a message from one of them announcing it is starved for memory
so increase the memory allocated to that one.
Click to expand...

BTW, this is Vmware Player. A response similar to this actually fixed this, but in the opposite way. I set the PF on the Vista VM to 200 MB, and it started running much better.

So I did the same on the Win7 VM and spent some time with them at lunch. They run almost perfectly now, so problem solved!

Thanks so much folks!
 
Well, removed paging file and performance is about the same - which is to say GOOD!
I don't do snapshots, so not an issue.
I usually just clone the vhd to a new vdh and nuke the old one, but sdelete sounds interesting. Most of my data and saves from Firefox are on a shared folder on the host os, so the images don't get huge like it used to.
As mentioned in the OP, fragmentation on the host was an issue when using the paging file, so will be interesting to see how it does without it. Do defragment every once in a while from within the guest, but it really never gets that bad.
 
yea I was running out of room on my system since I have so many VmWrk and Virtualbox VMs

but using sdelete -z after deleting the VM page files and then compressing
recovered a ton of space

this command works good to zero out any Linux VM drives:
cat /dev/zero > zero.fill; sync; sleep 1; sync;rm -f zero.fill
 
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When I disabled the pagefile on my XP machine with 512MB RAM, Chrome would just crash after I opened about 2 tabs. Pale Moon did way better but I did manage to make it crash too if I opened about 8 new tabs/sites quickly. It seemed that whenever my RAM usage hit around 478MB it expected the pagefile to take over. It was amusing to see Chrome crash so much saying something like "Waahhhh I don't know why I'm Crashing". I've heard some badly coded programs expect it to be there, but they normally just kill themselves which is more funny than annoying. Something to try for fun with XP and 512MB RAM if you're bored. :awe:
 
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512 is a bare minimum for the state that XP eventually evolved into. I would probably not try to run it less than a gig without a page file. Possibly less if you have tweaked it enough.

And don't forget Vista is a completely different animal than Vista, so it may freak out is you totally disable it.

Chrome is also a memory hog when you get over a couple tabs. Which is the way it was designed to run. But if you are low on RAM, IE is probably the leanest you can get.
 
Windows 7 is a PIG in a VM environment, I don't know why, it's just dog slow. It works fine in ESXi as it probably has some kind of optimizations built into vmware tools, but any other VM solution like Virtualbox it runs ridiculously slow. I never had good luck with it in a VM.

XP is ok but even then I find it has weird stability issues. For example at work we have these VMs we use for this one program as it requires a specific version of Java while other apps on our PC require another version of Java, well half the time we need to get IT to rebuild the VMs because for no apartment reason they'll go into a state where you can't RDP to them and just get a blank blue screen. Only does this in a VM.
 
Sounds like you fixed your problem, but you might want to give an ultralight GNU/Linux distro a try. Doesn't sound like you /need/ Windows for your specific applications, so you could strip a distro down to the essentials, and save some resources(and licenses) for other things. If nothing else, it'll give you something to play with. Nice thing about virtualization is it's risk free.
 
lxskllr said:
Sounds like you fixed your problem, but you might want to give an ultralight GNU/Linux distro a try. Doesn't sound like you /need/ Windows for your specific applications, so you could strip a distro down to the essentials, and save some resources(and licenses) for other things. If nothing else, it'll give you something to play with. Nice thing about virtualization is it's risk free.
Click to expand...

You are correct sir. I put Debian on a VM last week, but having trouble right off the bat getting vmtools to install (I have a lot to learn, lol).
 
Red Squirrel said:
Windows 7 is a PIG in a VM environment, I don't know why, it's just dog slow. It works fine in ESXi as it probably has some kind of optimizations built into vmware tools, but any other VM solution like Virtualbox it runs ridiculously slow. I never had good luck with it in a VM.

XP is ok but even then I find it has weird stability issues. For example at work we have these VMs we use for this one program as it requires a specific version of Java while other apps on our PC require another version of Java, well half the time we need to get IT to rebuild the VMs because for no apartment reason they'll go into a state where you can't RDP to them and just get a blank blue screen. Only does this in a VM.
Click to expand...

heh, XP is a great VM OS, when it works.
Personally, 7 is running great for me once I disabled/removed quite a few things. If you want, I can post this evening/weekend if I catch some time.
 
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