vmware player in ubuntu- how to make it faster

I am using windows 7 guest in vmware player in ubuntu as host OS.

I just want to know two questions:

1- Which settings will make my VM faster:

a- root and home directories on the same partition

or

b- root and home directories on separate partitions

( I am assuming here that vmware palyer is installed mainly in root directory while virtual disks are in home directory. I guess that I/O will be slower if root and home directory are on separate partitions. Am I true?)

2- Is it better to keep Virtual disks on home partition or on another separate data partition of same disk or an external USB disk? Which option will make the VM relatively faster.

Thanks for any help.

 

Another disk, preferably internal, will give you the highest performance boost.
Mrk

 

To me, I think that a home directory would be best. However, vmware is a pain on linux, at least on my machine. It consequently, converted my machine to a thick molasses, slow like hell and I'm NOT lacking any RAM power, 8GB of RAM is plenty to run the most taxing application. I cannot explain why vmware (player and workstation) did not work too well but I quickly uninstalled it and now my computer is breathing some fresh air with VirtualBox.

Currently Using LinuxMint 10
Tried vmware also on Ubuntu 10.10 and on Windows 7 (as host) also with the same result. My advice to you try VirtualBox.

Thanks.

 

I have only one internal disk. Will it be faster on same partition or on another partition of same internal disk?

Thanks

 

It seems OK on my laptop. Actually I can,t test Comodo IS on VBox, so revereted to VMware.

 

I think theoretically one partition is faster but it doesn't really matter, it's marginally at best.
What can significantly improve disk performance is preallocate the complete guest partition instead of a dynamic file. I think there is such an option in VMware, in VBox there certainly is.

You can further improve disk IO by changing some settings in the guest OS: disabling system restore/previous versions, disabling indexing, thumbnails, page file and maybe NTFS compression. The last one you should first do benchmarks on, I haven't seen any recommendations, it's just an idea I got while writing this down, as always there's a trade off, CPU. I don't know if it's worth it, certainly depends largely on your workload.

If that still doesn't yield the desired performance you 'll have to upgrade some hardware: as much RAM as you can get and a fast second disk, preferably high end SSD internally (some laptops can be modded to have two disks instead of optical) or over eSATA, USB3 or something fast, USB2 is to be avoided at all cost.

 

In my experience, VMware is generally better on Windows hosts, and VBox is generally better on Ubuntu hosts. Also, both Win XP and Ubuntu VMs are dramatically faster with VBox Guest Additions. Windows 7, OTOH, was not. However, that was a few months ago, and perhaps they've improved.