In effort to squeeze a little bit more performance from my vSphere 5
whitebox, I tried to tune some settings of my VMware Workstation 8.
Recently, I've found disk activity concerning .vmem files (From
vmware.com: vmem is the virtual machine's paging file, which backs up
the guest main memory
on the host file system. This file exists only when the virtual machine
is running, or if the virtual machine has crashed.). I don't think that I
do need this files because I don't want suspend my virtual machines
etc. I need pure performance, so I decided to tweak some Workstation
settings. First of all find "config.ini" (In my Windows 7 it's located
in "C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation") and add/modify the
following parameters:
mainMem.useNamedFile = "no" - tells not to use .vmem files
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100" - fit all virtual machine
memory into reserved host RAM. Swapping won't be occurring so the host
machine must have enough memory to accommodate the sum of all memory
reserved for every single virtual machine.
prefvmx.allVMMemoryLimit = "15000" - this parameter tells how much host memory can be used for the virtual machine memory allocation.
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "yes" - well, to be honest I don't really need what this parameter do, but I've seen suggestion to enable it :)
