VMWare Best Pratice

You should use raid 10 or at least 5 to get enough speed for the Disk Access. Both SQL and exchange access the Disks a lot. Also generally you must first find out how much RAM your Hosting OS requires along with all other services running, and subtract that from your current RAM. Then you should have enough RAM for each guest OS (I don't know what win2k8 really needs, but I guess it will need quite a bit to run smoothly. As you only have 2 cores, only allocate one core to your VM's. And I's add more RAM. Since you are using all 64bit OS's you can add as much RAM as you can. Fit in as much as your mainboard can take. If this is going to be a production environment, I'd also rather use VmWare's ESXi server, as that runs on it's own very small OS with little footprint. There is a free version of this, but it doesn't include all the utilities. You will have to make sure though that your hardware is in the compatibility list.

Larstr,

Thanks for your article but :

- 1. I'm using a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+ with technologies SpeedStep (I think), I need some special config to have a fix CPU Speed ?
- 2. I'm using VMWare Server 2.0 and I can't found the params described on the point 2

Regards

Ghislain

Ghislain,
The parameters in point 2 are not available through the GUI and you will need to add them manually in the config file.

SpeedStep is intel so you probably have Cool'n Quiet. You can disable this in the BIOS.

Lars

AMI-CoolnQuiet.jpg