Virtual Development Environment Performance - .NET Development

Question

I have the following setup for my daily/main/only development environment

Hardware/Tin = 4gb ram, 2.6ghz dual core CPU, 2x250gb HD's, usual array of periperhals

One the tin above, I currently have Windows XP installed, in Windows XP I have VMWare Workstation installed and I run a Windows Server 2003 deelopment environment. This includes,Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008, Sql Sever 2005/2008, Full MS Office suite, some producitivity tools (e.g. Redgate Sql/Data Compare, DevXpress Coderush, TestDriven.net etc).

I have problems with this, it runs slow (15 minutes to boot), the Watch/Autos windows in VS freeze up when debugging, I can't have more than 2-3 copies of VS open, the Errors window freezes up, WinGrep and COm+ constantly runs out of Virtual Desktop Memory and so forth (In fact, I would attribue most of the issues to Virtual Desktop Memory)

Now, I've tried every tweak in the book, I have second HD for VMWare, my paging file is on a differnt drive, I've adjusted my Ram split between guest and host, I've hacked the reg key for Virtual Desktop Memory and all of this to no avail.

Now, I could increase my Ram or CPU, but I'm not able to.

My question is, has anybody experienced the above, and if so, how did you solve it? Did you try ESXi? or shift your environment to raw tin?

Answer 1

IMHO, you've tried just about every tweak in the book. I'd suggest that you should just move to native for your main setup, and restrict VM use for testing.

I use a VM as my main dev env, but I don't run as much stuff as you, so I don't hit a big performance wall.

Answer 2

I guess the trick you didn't try was to run less things on your VM. 2-3 copies of VS are a recipe for slowness. Running Sql Server, same thing. Bump up memory would be good, but at least run services (iis, sql server) on another vm or better yet, another box. You are taxing your VM waay too much, it is not VM's fault.

Answer 3

The problem you run into most of the time on VPS is IO wait.

Do you run your virtual machine off of a disk image, if so try defragmenting your drive. Or did you dedicate a partition to it?

Edit: I would suggest to:

• either try defragmenting the drive that has the disk image
• either try dedicating a partition to the virtual machine, instead of using a disk image all together. (ideally the first partition on the drive, since this will have the lowest random access time)

Running off a disk image works, but since you're working on top of a filesystem, the disk image might be fragmented throughout the disk.

Good luck, hope it helps...