The last 3-4 weeks I’ve been running Windows XP through Vmware using the free Vmplayer 2.0 package provided by Vmware itself. The exciting thing about this is that Windows are running directly from the physical partition on top of Linux. This may prove useful sometimes for applications/scenarios that definitely need Windows i.e. I still find some MS Office programs such as Visio, again given free from the University , extremely useful.
I followed the excellent guide at http://www.motin.eu/www/mirror/physvmware/ and everything went ok. The re-activation of Windows XP is necessary since the Vmware profile is significantly different from the standard hardware. Fortunately the network was operational so activation was completed online in a matter of seconds. Even though I have 2 processors and 1 GB of RAM, initially processes were running barely ok (mainly I/O and memory thrashing responsible for this). After configuring a couple of options in .vmx file I found myself running Windows within Linux without understanding the difference. Throughout the process it is implied that Vmware tools are already installed.
1st problem fixed - Jerky mouse. For some reason once I logged in and the Vmware service started running the mouse became jerky and sometimes it was jumping. I increased the sample rate up to 200 Hz without seeing a difference. In Vmplayer 1.0.3 stopping the service helped a little but it still did not feel comfortable. In Vmplayer 2.0 that did not help at all. These options fixed the problem.
vmmouse.present = “TRUE”
vmmouse.fileName = “auto detect”
2nd problem fixed - Heavy I/O -As I said before heavy I/O were taking lots of time i.e when an application was executed. Initially I set ide0:0.writeThrough = “TRUE” since writethrough is known to perform better than writeback under heavy load which was constantly observed in my case. That did not help as much (I can’t tell if there was a difference or not). The solution was to disable the creation of a named file (.vmem file).
mainMem.useNamedFile=”FALSE”
That turned out to boost my performance a lot since Vmplayer stored the memory in /tmp which I had set as a dynamic “tmpfs” partition
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=1000m,mode=1777 0 0
Therefore depending on my available memory parts of the data were stored directly in RAM. Eventually I set ide0:0.writeThrough = “FALSE” again.
3rd problem - Shared folders - I could see a “Shared Folders” item in the menu but the list of shared folders was disabled. After searching around I found I had to insert the following options in the .vmx file:
sharedFolder.option = “alwaysEnabled”
sharedFolder.maxNum = “1″
sharedFolder0.present = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.enabled = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.readAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.writeAccess = “TRUE”
sharedFolder0.hostPath = “/directorytoshare”
sharedFolder0.guestName = “public”
sharedFolder0.expiration = “never”
isolation.tools.hgfs.disable = “FALSE” is also needed although it can be configured from Vmware icon in the Windows taskbar.
I also find useful to enable copy/paste.
isolation.tools.copy.enable = “TRUE”
isolation.tools.paste.enabled = “TRUE”
Another optimization trick is to unload everything unnecessary i.e I don’t run antivirus neither firewall, I disabled more than 20 services and auto startup applications (msconfig is useful for that). Right now I’ve assigned around 300MB of RAM and when Windows start there are around 150MB free.
Finally even though Vmware runs fine in a Linux window it may be necessary sometimes to run Windows in fullscreen. That may be as easy as changing the resolution in Display or (for my case with a widescreen) inserting a new resolution for the Vmware display driver in the registry.
Vmware has done a fantastic job….I haven’t tried any of the other virtualization tools but what more than this can somebody ask…maybe 3D since I still have problems enabling the mks.enable3d option.
I sucked/converted the original OS partition into VMware and it wanted activating until I set the following in the vmx file. This supposedly replicates what the hardware BIOS says to the virtual machine so it looks like it is mostly the same computer, which it really is.
Maybe it’ll help with going from real partition to vm and back again.
SMBIOS.reflectHost = “TRUE”
Hi,
I am a former die-hard windows admin…
What sucks is that if I want to test or temporarily use a workstation as a VM; I’ll get some kind of dumb activation or WGA problems (Dell OEM).
Basically hackers will find ways around paying and will use a hacked version of windows that won’t give them WGA and activation problems, and paying customers will have all the grief of dealing with VM’s that won’t activate, different hardware being seen and so on…
This reminds me of the software that I used a few years back… it had several layers of protection against piracy, you would have to call them and give them some ID (unique and based on datetime), then they would provide you with a special code that you could register the software with…. however if you would defrag or make the wrong system change then you would get de-activated and would have to do this all over again on each system (>60).
So as a tech I’d have to deal with this bullsh*t. But if you did a Google search, you could find a link that would you get you a patch file that would turn any demo version of the product into the full version and disable the de-activation process…
So what does this mean?
This means that paying customers get the activation shaft and hackers get the product free without any of the hassle that paying customers are put thru.
I don’t agree with any type of software activation that causes a paying consumer more grief than a non-paying consumer….
I think open source is the answer here, the focus is more targeted toward how the software will work and less about forcing the consumer into dealing with closed source piracy issues.
IMHO…this is why paying for support is much more intelligent than paying for the product.