Download Performance Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 5.5

Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 5.5
VMware Workstation
This section provides an overview of the topics in this paper applying to the VMware
Workstation software. More detail about each of these topics is provided in VMware Workstation
on page 19.
CPU
!
Don’t overcommit CPU resources (for example, don’t run multiple virtual machines on a
single-processor host system).
!
Allow for the CPU overhead required by virtualization.
Memory
! Carefully select the amount of virtual memory you allocate to your virtual machines. Either
too much or too little virtual memory can reduce performance.
!
Disable memory trimming for the virtual machine.
!
Disable page sharing for the virtual machine.
Disks
! Store virtual disks on local drives (rather than on network drives).
!
Configure the virtual machine to emulate SCSI instead of IDE disks.
!
Configure the virtual machine to use preallocated disks (as opposed to growable disks).
!
Configure the virtual machine to use persistent disks (as opposed to nonpersistent
disks).
Networking
! Remove or disable any virtual networking devices that are not required for your tests.
Miscellaneous
! Make sure you are using a generally-available version of VMware Workstation (rather than a
beta or debug version).
!
Make sure you are not running VMware Workstation in debug mode.
!
Leave VMware Workstation logging enabled, as it has an extremely small impact on
performance.
!
Make sure the log files are stored on a local disk (rather than on a network drive).
!
Full screen mode and normal (windowed) mode now have nearly the same
performance.
!
Make sure you have selected the correct guest operating system in the virtual machine
settings editor.
!
Make sure that any non-default VMware Workstation configuration settings are intentional.
!
Configure the virtual machines to start with optical drives (i.e., CD or DVD) disconnected. If
the optical drives won’t be used, completely remove them from the virtual machine’s
configuration.
!
Use purpose-built virtual machines.
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