Hi group! We partition our Mac HD's for deployment into 3 drives. Boot disk on one and the 2 remaining for data. On one of the data partitions, we copy our VM we've created and then configure manually per workstation. I've been getting complaints about the perfomance of these VM's and was wondering if the partitioning on the Macs HD has anything to do with it. It's a Windows 7 VM running version 6 of Parallels desktop. We haven't upgraded to Parallels 7 yet, because of cost. Any ideas? Thanks!
May I ask you why you decided to use 3 partitions for Windows? Is this really necessary? One of my nightmares I had to deal with is Windows installations that use one partition for boot and programs and a second for data, but the boot partition eventually gets low on free space and the data partition just sits there with plenty free space, ideally one partition is better for Windows XP/7, gives a lot less headaches, besides, if the disk fails it doesn't matter if it's partioned or not, so I don't understand the reasoning.
Not the Windows side. The Mac side is partitioned. Then our Windows 7 VM is copied to one of the 2 data drives.
Correct! I've even tried all the Windows 7 tweaks suggested on other forums. It's a little better but nothing like a physical box. By the way, just an FYI: these are iMacs running 10.6.8 with 1 terabyte drives split in 3. Mac OS on one one partition. Data and VM on other 2.
Most likely the problem is RAM related? If there is paging occurring in either OS it will slow the machine down significantly. How much RAM do these machines have? How much is reserved for the VM? When the slowness occurs have you monitored free RAM?
