VMware Slow

randy

Supporting Member
Join Date
Apr 2002
Posts
158
We recently purchase a new laptop with Windows 7 on it. In order to ran my A-B (RSView, RSLogix500, RSLogix5000 Ver18, and PanelView) we acquired VMware Player. I tested this on a MicroLogix 1200 using a UBS Serial Converter and it seems very slow and quite often I’m disconnect from the PLC.
Is there any additional setting on the VMware Player I should be configuring?

Processor on the laptop:
Inte (R) Core (TM) i5 CPU M520 @2.40GHz
4.00 GB RAM
32-bit OS
rmonroe
 
What is your Guest OS?

How much memory (RAM) does the VM have assigned to it.

Try disabling some background processes and applications in win 7 that are not needed.
 
You need more than 2 GB per instance of VMWare running.
Interesting, did you get this from experience, or from VMWare? I don't want to hijack this thread, but.....

I have run 3x separate VM's on the odd occasion, and results have been ok, most have between 750mb & 1gb. My host does now have 8gb though, which has been a huge improvement!

I did read on the forum here recently about defragging, this is something that we had not thought of before, what is the best practice for this?
 
I have 4 GB in the host.
My VMs have only 768 MB, and they run acceptably, even with WinCC Flexible (!).
RSLogix 500 is quite un-demanding in comparison, so I am guessing that the problem lies with the serial link itself.

Try to run the VMware Player on another PC.
Try to use another USB-serial adapter.
 
I have the same problem with the constant disconnection in RS500 using Windows XP mode in Windows 7. My host has 8 gig of ram and I have 2 gig assigned to the VM. I have also tried messing around with the network settings in both the host RS Links and VM to no avail. I am using Ethernet for comms.
 
Interesting, did you get this from experience, or from VMWare? I don't want to hijack this thread, but.....

I have run 3x separate VM's on the odd occasion, and results have been ok, most have between 750mb & 1gb. My host does now have 8gb though, which has been a huge improvement!

I did read on the forum here recently about defragging, this is something that we had not thought of before, what is the best practice for this?

One issue with VMware you have to be careful of is what you have running on the host. If the host is sucking down ram then things will grind. I can fire up Auto CAD 2010 on my Host and my VM will all but stop.

Also had another issue with "Link scanner" virus protection. It treated VM like I was running a web browser. This really slowed down comms.

We found the defrag issue the hard way. You can not really defrag a VM on a host harddrive. The host can not defrag the Vm and you can ot go into VM and defrag.

The solution is simple. Move your Vm to an external drive. Defrag your host then move the VM back.

Depnding on how you use VM will decide how frequent this becomes an issue. I use VM as my regular desktop so it is an issue for me.

My guess on the original poster's issue is with the serial converter. I would make sure the correct drivers are loaded. I know some of the off brands serial converters have problems in general with AB. I have yet to figure it out and just make sure I use a Keyspan serial converter. So far no issues here.
 
I got it from exerience/operator errpr

Interesting, did you get this from experience, or from VMWare? I don't want to hijack this thread, but.....
I accidently started up two Win XP VM's on my 4GB Mac Pro. Each VM was set to 2GB of memory use. The 2 VMs and the MAC OS X needed more than 4 GB and it slowed down. It was constantly thrashing the disk. I have a 7200 RPM drive that just couldn't keep up. I added 4 GB of ram. It was a cheap upgrade and now I can run the two VMs with no problem.

I did read on the forum here recently about defragging, this is something that we had not thought of before, what is the best practice for this?
That makes me nervous. My Mac doesn't need defragging and I don't know if it will help on a VM since the files are not located on real locations anyway. I don't defrag VMs. I would definitely back up before I do.
 
Peter:

Its not that Macs don't need defragging. Macs simply do it automatically behind the scenes. Has to do with the way the FS works. HFS doesn't fill in gaps on the drive like FAT or NTFS does, It prefers to find a contiguous block instead. Same reason you don't generally have to manually defrag EXT2/3 FS.
 
One issue with VMware you have to be careful of is what you have running on the host. If the host is sucking down ram then things will grind. I can fire up Auto CAD 2010 on my Host and my VM will all but stop.

Also had another issue with "Link scanner" virus protection. It treated VM like I was running a web browser. This really slowed down comms.

We found the defrag issue the hard way. You can not really defrag a VM on a host harddrive. The host can not defrag the Vm and you can ot go into VM and defrag.

The solution is simple. Move your Vm to an external drive. Defrag your host then move the VM back.

Depnding on how you use VM will decide how frequent this becomes an issue. I use VM as my regular desktop so it is an issue for me.

My guess on the original poster's issue is with the serial converter. I would make sure the correct drivers are loaded. I know some of the off brands serial converters have problems in general with AB. I have yet to figure it out and just make sure I use a Keyspan serial converter. So far no issues here.

Clay

On our laptops dell M6500 have 2 hard drives primary SSD 160 GB and secondary 7200 RPM 1TB. We store and run vm's off the secondary hard drive and it makes things much faster.

VM's need to be on a seperate physical disk from the host in a ideal situation. The fact that i have them on the secondary hard drive it should not be a issue correct?

What do you see with this defrag issue? Will it just never complete? Or are errors Generated? We run disk keeper on all our corporate computers as it helps deep freeze perform better i could try disk keeper in the vm to see if it improves performance. I run 3gb ram in my xp vm's as the laptops have 12gb and i never run mor than 2 vm's on the laptops.

If i need more than 2 vm's open i do it on the desktop pc which has 24gb of ram and has no problems running 4+ vm's.
 
Just as a side not i just built a win 95 vm and it was a PITA.

Finding the correct drivers was tough for the virtual hardware.

Fair warning if anyone ever attempts this.
 
NT 4 is fun too. If anyone needs to p2v one of those into ESX or ESXI look me up. I spent hours getting that working.
 

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