Optimize your Virtual Machines

InVirtus VM Optimizer, as the name suggests, can enhance performance of virtual machines running on VMware or Microsoft's Virtualization software

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Here is a software that lets you optimize your Virtual Machines running inside your host OS. It supports VMware and MS Virtual Server/PC both. It reduces a virtual machine's virtual hard drive to the smallest size possible and also optimizes and configures your Windows guest OS for faster booting, faster run-time responsiveness and increased overall system performance.

Reducing the size of a virtual hard disk (vmdk with VMware/vhd with Microsoft) to the maximum can deliver a great advantage if virtual machine usage forms a big part of your organization's computing strategy. Let's see how to use it and for this, first download the software from www.invirtus.com.

Applies To: Datacenter managers Price: $169 corporate single edition USP: Run virtual machines faster on your host windows OS Primary Link: http://www.invirtus.com/ Google Keywords: PC optimizer

Step 1: Configure host OS
Once downloaded, install it on your host OS and then launch the tool from Start> Program>InVirtus VM Optimizer>Setting Manager. You then get a window, where you have to select 'Change Settings'. Now in another window, you will be shown all the parameters that could hinder the performance of the host OS. This is a mix of unnecessary services, temporary and backup files and installed applications.

Click on the Calculate Space button to find out the hard disk space used by the files and applications. Thus, allowing you to clean up the disk space. Now, de-select parameters that you think is not required in the host OS. After this, click on Apply and press OK. Now, reboot the machine and your host machine gets optimized. This disables the services on the host and creates a file called services.txt.

Step 2: Optimize the VM
Next step is to optimize the virtual machine using the software. For this, open the VM settings and select CD-ROM Configuration. Here, in the CD-ROM settings, you have to mount an InVirtus VM Optimizer ISO image, which resides at C:\Program Files\ InVirtus VM Optimizer\. Mount this image on the CD-ROM and Save.

Select the services that you want to release from the host OS so that the virtual machine can run faster

Then launch the virtual machine. After booting the virtual machine successfully, go to CD-ROM and double click on it. This will open a wizard as shown in the screenshot, which will automatically optimize VM in one go. Here it uses the services.txt file to disable the services from the virtual machine. After running the optimizing wizard, reboot your virtual machine and you can easily see the performance difference while working on optimized virtual machines.

Page(s)   1