Suggestion for Virtual Machine setup

[Makaveli]

Hi all,

I just upgraded my machine to 12GB's of ram because I intend to start working on some VM's. Goal for right now is to have an OSX and a linux VM up and running the Mac os is a higher priority currently.

Need some help from those that are very experiened with VMs.

What is the recommended setup?

Do I put the VM's on my SSD? What about the VM's writing to the SSD etc etc?

I'm going to be using VMware.

Any tips or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

If you have enough space, a VM on the SSD will give you the best performance. VMware pre-allocates the virtual hard disk so you should be fine there.

 

[Makaveli]

I installed the VMware software to SSD drive but for now left the VM on a 7200 drive just for testing.

 

[Nothinman]

Preallocating the vmdks is optional and for testing I don't usually do it.

Essentially it comes down to how much you trust the SSD. Running a lot of VMs off of it will be a lot faster but will also cause a lot of writes. That and 160G doesn't last very long these days considering how big Win7 is. VMware Workstations' performance with a decent amount of memory is pretty good so I would personally put them on a secondary drive and if performance wasn't good enough then try moving them to the SSD.

 

[Makaveli]

Performance seems to be good enough that I don't need to move it onto my SSD as yet.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Yeah, you're right you probably don't need to move it to your SSD if the performance is ok.