{"id":36,"date":"2006-04-23T20:27:21","date_gmt":"2006-04-23T19:27:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/archives\/36"},"modified":"2006-06-22T19:29:57","modified_gmt":"2006-06-22T18:29:57","slug":"increasing-performance-of-vmware-on-external-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/2006\/04\/23\/increasing-performance-of-vmware-on-external-devices\/","title":{"rendered":"Increasing Performance of VMWare Virtual Machines on External Devices"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By default, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vmware.com\">VMware<\/a> Workstation 5.x use a memory mapped file for backing the RAM of the simulated machines. This eases the pressure on the system&#8217;s page file. If you host the virtual machine on an external drive, however, this can become a bottle neck, especially if the external device is slow (e.g. USB 1.1, flash, etc.).<\/p>\n<p>As described in this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vmware.com\/support\/kb\/enduser\/std_adp.php?p_sid=x8NVkM5i&#038;p_lva=&#038;p_faqid=1620&#038;p_created=1112131543&#038;p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTUwJnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9c2xvdyBleHRlcm5hbCZwX3NlYXJjaF90eXBlPTcmcF9wcm9kX2x2bDE9fmFueX4mcF9wcm9kX2x2bDI9fmFueX4mcF9zb3J0X2J5PWRmbHQmcF9wYWdlPTE*&#038;p_li=\">VMware Knowledge Base Article<\/a>, you can turn of VMWare&#8217;s behaviour to use a memory mapped file and force it to use the system&#8217;s paging mechanism instead. To do so, you just have to add<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><code>mainMem.useNamedFile=FALSE<\/code><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>to your virtual machine&#8217;s configuration file (.vmx).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By default, VMware Workstation 5.x use a memory mapped file for backing the RAM of the simulated machines. This eases the pressure on the system&#8217;s page file. If you host the virtual machine on an external drive, however, this can become a bottle neck, especially if the external device is slow (e.g. USB 1.1, flash, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/2006\/04\/23\/increasing-performance-of-vmware-on-external-devices\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Increasing Performance of VMWare Virtual Machines on External Devices&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[33,35,37,36,32,95,28,31,34,26],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software","tag-configuration","tag-external-device","tag-faq","tag-howto","tag-optimization","tag-performance","tag-speed","tag-tuning","tag-usb","tag-vmware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dont-panic.cc\/capi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}