Anybody familiar with VMWare tuning?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Tuesday 22 January 2008 08:52:11 am Brian Karas wrote:
> I've got a couple of windows guests (SQL Server and IIS) running on a
> fairly beefy CentOS box (64 bit, dual quad-core, Dell 2950 I think). 
> Everything just seems way slower than it should.
>
> I don't have enough experience to really dig into it.  If anyone has any
> suggestions/tips/ideas/etc it would be much appreciated.  I'd like to
> figure out the best way to allocate resources to get a fairly decent
> response time and stability.

I kid you not, but it is actually recommended to oversubscribe the crap out of 
memory allocation on Windows guests if your host OS is Linux. Windows is 
grossly inefficient when it comes to swap, and even more so when running as a 
guest OS, due to the amount of trapping and emulating required to swap. 
Oversubscribe your Windows guest memory allocation, and if/when the host runs 
out of physical memory, the swapping will be done on the Linux side, rather 
than letting Windows swap.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com