Running Visual Studio and sites inside a VMware RAM Disk

Question

I have a machine with 24 GB so I was planning to install Vista 64-bit and nothing on it but VMware workstation 6.5 Vista Image, that will be installed on a RAM Disk that I will make on the main Vista.

The whole VMware Image will be in RAM, so I will install Visual Studio 2008 in it and put all my sites there as if it was a real disk. I have done a few tests of running applications from RAM Disk and the performance was blazing, but I have some concerns.

• How can I make continuous backups? Since it’s a RAM disk, once the PC is restarted, everything will be gone: Visual Studio, SQL databases, my sites, and everything else.

• As long as my main host Vista doesn’t have anything installed, is leaving 8 GB of RAM for it is enough?

• The VMware Image is one file, so should I defrag the host drive or the drive inside the VMware image?

Answer 1

Defragmentation: Here's what VMWare recommends: "first, run a defragmentation utility in the VM; second, use the WMware Workstation defragmentation tool; third, run a defragmentation utility on the host"

Backup: for my VMs, I use SynbackPro to run a timed backup of my project files to a SHARED folder on my host machine, then on the host I have SyncbackPro running a timed backup to an external drive. That way, no matter which VM I happen to be using, the external drive gets the backups.

Answer 2

Have a look at Live Mesh. It will take care of synchronising all the data for you. When you reboot your RAM image it will pull the files back down. In general use the only difference you notice between a LiveMesh folder and a normal one is the folder icon.

Answer 3

RAM disk is a great idea in principle, but you might not gain as much as you think. First, its declared overhead is about 10%, but in our server it degraded the performance in about 30-40%. Second, when having a lot of memory at hand, the system cache can load most of your files into memory anyway, so effectively all your IO is done with the RAM.

This is based on our experience with our server, and it might to apply to your case. I would suggest you at least try to install everything directly on the OS, let it run for some time so all needed files are cached, and then check the performance. If it's similar to what you have with VMWare + RAM disk, it would be much easier for you to maintain.

Answer 4

To me this doesn't seem like a good idea, if the system goes down the ram disk is destroyed.

I would focus on simply allocating the ram in a helpful manner, and keeping the OS files on disk.