Thursday, August 13, 2009

quick vmware perf foo (lameeee non sec post)

i was sick of my win VM running sooo slowwwww, so i defragged the 'drive' using the windows defrag utility. then every time i booted my win vm my lptp hdd thrashed and thrashed and performance was worse than before...

so i found out there's a defrag util for VMs... anyway, after a few pitfalls here's a concise description of the tasks:

vmware-mount /path/to/file.vmdk /mnt/
vmware-vdiskmanager -p /mnt/
[kill some time while the vmdk preps]
vmware-mount -d /mnt/
vmware-vdiskmanager -k /path/to/file.vmdk
[kill some time while the vmdk shrinks]
vmware-vdiskmanager -d /path/to/file.vmdk
[kill some time while the vmdk is defragged]



so i ended up w/ a free 30 gig of space after shrinking the disk, and everything is running pretty snappy again. you need at least as much free space on your disk as the size of your vmdk in order to perform the shrink and defrag operations...

time to go write some reports... >sigh<