Windows server 2008r2 on v6

Hi,

I have a MB Pro with 4th ram and a 2.53 processor (late 2009 model). Due to a course I am taken, I have to install Microsoft server 2008 r2 via parallels v6, but it is running really slow. I have allocated 2gb ram to the virtual machine.

I was thinking of upgrading the ram in the mac to 8gb and then allocating 4th to the virtual machine. Would this help?

Any other help would be great.

Thanks

 

What Windows roles have you installed? Is this just a test system or are you actually serving clients?

I use a Server 2008 R2 virtual machine with just 1GB assigned memory as my test system on my 2008 mac pro and things seem okay speed wise. I have Active Directory, DNS, DHCP and IIS installed but not anything huge like Exchange, also as it is only my test system it has no Anti-Virus. The only time I have noticed a slowdown is when the server is doing lots of disk access like when installing Windows updates etc. Do you notice the Parallels disk activity indicator flashing a lot?

You could also try running Performance Monitor (perfmon.exe) on the server to check for any particular problems.

Andrew

 

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

At the moment, Windows is just a basic installation, but running really slow, and the Mac is running very very slow. I have allocated 1.5gb (of 4gb ram) to the Windows virtual partition.

What setup are you running on yours?

Thanks

Jason

 

Without any roles installed I would expect performance to be similar to that of Windows 7 x64 so not sure what the problem could be. I have 1GB (of 6GB) allocated to the VM but often have a couple of other client 1GB VMs open at the same time without the slowdowns you are seeing.

I still think something doing a lot of disk access is the most likely culprit, does Activity Monitor on the mac indicate a high level of disk access is taking place? If so can you use Task Scheduler in Windows to see what processes are running? Any sign of 'msiexec.exe', 'wuauclt.exe' or 'searchindexer.exe' using more than 10% of the cpu? These background processes typically do a lot of disk access, the first 2 should stop once all the Windows Updates are installed and the 3rd can be stopped by disabling the 'Windows Search' service.

Andrew