Question

I am trying to set up a clean vm I will use in many of my devs. Hopefully I will use it many times and for a long time, so I want to get it right and set it up so performance is as good as possible. I have searched for a list of things to do, but strangely found only older posts, and none here.

My requirements are:

• My host is Vista 32b, and guest is Windows2008 64b, using Vmware Workstation.
• The VM should also be able to run on a Vmware ESX
• I cannot move to other products (VirtualBox etc), but info about performance of each one is welcomed for reference. Anyway I guess most advices would apply to other OSs and other VM products.
• I need network connectivity to my LAN

• When developing/testing, guest will run several java processes, a DB and perform some file I/O

  What I have found so far is:

  1. HOWTO: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Performance Out of Your Virtual PCs: it’s and old post, and about Virtual PC, but I guess most things still apply (and also apply to vmware).
  2. I guess it makes a difference to disable all unnecessary services, but the ones mentioned in 1 seem like too few, I specifically always disable Windows Search. Any other service I should disable?

Answer 1

You can try to run the CD/DVD through vLite to remove unwanted crap. I’m not 100% sure if Windows 2008 server is supported but you could give it a try. I’ve successfully stripped down XP with nLite to about 200MB with only the bare minimum I need for testing software. You might be able to do something similar to Windows 2008 with vLite.