Scott Hanselman

Here's a great list of tips from my buddy J. Sawyer at MSFT.

Biggest perf tip is to put the VPC Virtual Hard Disks (VHD) to separate disk spindles from the operating system.  The biggest perf issue with VPC is related to disk I/O … and by making the VPC fight with your OS and swap disk make this issue much, much worse.  Additionally, today’s USB 2.0 and Firewire external hard drives run on a fast interface bus (Firewire does have some advantages over USB 2.0, but both are excellent), have a large (8MB) buffer and spin at 7200 RPM, as opposed to 4200 RPM for most laptop HDD. 

Also, note the tip below regarding “Run Virtual PC at Maximum Speed” … this will give a boost to the VPC’s thread priorities at the expense of the host OS applications.  Depending on what you are using the VPC for, this may be exactly what you want. 

From a PPT Deck:

Guidelines:

• Ideally Virtual PC performance is at:
• CPU: 96-97% of host
• Network: 70-90% of host
• Disk: 40-70% of host
• However this is only for optimized guest operating systems running typical loads for a single process
• The Virtual PC team’s aim is always to provide the fastest possible solution while not compromising compatibility
• While virtual machines are not slow – there is always the potential for an unusual application to cause performance issues

Performance Tuning

• Guest Performance – Preferences
• Check “File … Options”
• Running guest in background: Enable “Run Virtual PC at Maximum Speed”
• Running a test on multiple guests: Enable “All running virtual machines get equal CPU time”
• Memory
• Host should have a minimum of 256MB, 512MB – 1024MB recommended
• More memory is recommended for running multiple virtual machines simultaneously
• Each guest should be allocated memory like it would on a physical machine
• Virtual machines cannot use paged memory on the host system

Additional Disk Optimizations

• Virtual Hard Disk size
• Compress them
• Defrag guest
• Clear unused sectors ( Cipher, Eraser, etc.)
• DO NOT attempt this step on a differencing drive – it will expand the disk to maximum size and you cannot compact it.
• Compact using Virtual Disk Wizard
• Enable NTFS compression on host operating system
• Trades off performance for file size
• Virtual Hard Disk performance
• Place the .VHD files on separate spindle from host OS
• If using Undo or Differencing Disks, place them on an additional spindle

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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