It's happening again

[doodab]

I'm working on my recently acquired desktop, an i7-2600k with 16GB RAM, Intel 160GB SSD and 3 x 1TB mechanical drives and I'm thinking "I need more". OK, so I do have 2 VMs running with 6 cores and 12GB allocated between them but that' hardly overprovisioning run riot so why, aside from the fact that the stuff I'm running in the VMs is bloatware, is it so damn slow? So it looks like I might have to move one of the VMs onto the 8GB quad core box in the corner, unfortunately I don't think it has enough disk space. Cock.

Time for another SSD.

At least it all goes through the company.

[doodab]

And now the sodding printer has run out of ink.

Aaaarrgh.

I just want to earn some money for beer dammit, I don't want all this hassle.

[eek]

I'm working on my recently acquired desktop, an i7-2600k with 16GB RAM, Intel 160GB SSD and 3 x 1TB mechanical drives and I'm thinking "I need more". OK, so I do have 2 VMs running with 6 cores and 12GB allocated between them but that' hardly overprovisioning run riot so why, aside from the fact that the stuff I'm running in the VMs is bloatware, is it so damn slow? So it looks like I might have to move one of the VMs onto the 8GB quad core box in the corner, unfortunately I don't think it has enough disk space. Cock.

Time for another SSD.

At least it all goes through the company.

Don't use Windows as the base operating system. You don't have such issues with a MacBook due to the base operating system being vaguely usable.

[Scrag Meister]

Ink is not a cheap commodity. I need to get some too.

I have 2 striped 120Gb SSDs for my system drive and that is rapido, boot in about 40 secs.

I make an effort to minimise all the bloaty crap that can be installed, and no one else uses it except me and the wife.

[Sysman]

Don't use Windows as the base operating system. You don't have such issues with a MacBook due to the base operating system being vaguely usable.

3 Linux and 1 FreeBSD server instances running here under VirtualBox on a much lesser piece of kit than the OP. No sweat at all.

[nomadd]

I'm working on my recently acquired desktop, an i7-2600k with 16GB RAM, Intel 160GB SSD and 3 x 1TB mechanical drives and I'm thinking "I need more". OK, so I do have 2 VMs running with 6 cores and 12GB allocated between them but that' hardly overprovisioning run riot so why, aside from the fact that the stuff I'm running in the VMs is bloatware, is it so damn slow? So it looks like I might have to move one of the VMs onto the 8GB quad core box in the corner, unfortunately I don't think it has enough disk space. Cock.

Time for another SSD.

At least it all goes through the company.

Two VMS with 6 cores? Each? Even if not, it's only a quad core processor (yes, I know it's hyperthreaded.)

My machine is a MUCH older spec than that, but I have no problems running a couple of decent VMs; this is a Windows 7 host, and 2 Linux VMs.

What are the host stats telling you? Where is it choking? Disk, memory paging, cpu..? If the host OS thinks it's fine and dandy, then what are the tools in the hosted OSs telling you?

You need to grab some data.

[d000hg]

Don't use Windows as the base operating system. You don't have such issues with a MacBook due to the base operating system being vaguely usable.

Sad to see such OS-religious zealotry. You're stunningly ignorant if you don't think W7/2008 is at least "vaguely usable". Mac/Win/Linux are all decent options.

[Sysman]

What are the host stats telling you? Where is it choking? Disk, memory paging, cpu..? If the host OS thinks it's fine and dandy, then what are the tools in the hosted OSs telling you?

You need to grab some data.

Agreed.

When I was running VMware, Windows Resource Manager showed me that VMware was choking on the pagefiles it creates on behalf of VMs, even when there was plenty of free physcial RAM available.

[doodab]

Don't use Windows as the base operating system. You don't have such issues with a MacBook due to the base operating system being vaguely usable.

It really has little to do with the host OS being "inefficient". The software in question would usually be deployed on serious hardware (even a "small" deployment to a few hundred users is a job for 3 servers) and it tends to run like a bit of a dog whether hosted natively on unix, linux or windows, or as a VM in ESX. Partly this it to do with the out of the box config requiring some optimisation and but in terms of memory footprint it really starts around 6GB + the database for a pared down system and it's also fairly IO intensive, which is why I have that particular VM hosted on an SSD.

It might be that I need to throw money at it, but I really don't think spending ~ £3k on a macbook with a slower CPU and a single disk is going to make it magically go faster I'm afraid. Something like this is more likely to help:

LSI WarpDrive SLP-300 - PCIe Solid State Storage - LSI00263 - Scan.co.uk

or perhaps a dual-xeon box or another machine similar in spec to the one I have that can either host the larger VM or host the software natively.

[eek]

Sad to see such OS-religious zealotry. You're stunningly ignorant if you don't think W7/2008 is at least "vaguely usable". Mac/Win/Linux are all decent options.

Windows is usable just not as the basis of virtual machines. I don't know why that is the case and couldn't be arsed to find out so adopted the contractor approach of spending money to solve the issue.