Windows stripping & performance

Our software developers are starting to use VMware workstation as a matter
of course to run various development environments at the same time. Our
current standard of 32 bit Windows XP limits us to 3GB of memory so we're
considering switching to 64 bit Vista with 6GB memory.

At the same time, we are thinking about everything we can do to improve
performance and as VMware Workstation does (by default) a fair amount of
disk swapping, I wondered if it would be a good idea to specify the new PCs
with two SATA drives and use Windows's native stripping.

Does that make sense?

Appreciate all the caveats about dangers of stripping but all the data used
is on the network and backed up inc. the VMs themselves so loosing the disk
system due to hardware failure isn't too worrying.

Cheers, Rob.

Nope, you need more RAM. How many VMs and how big?

"Rob Nicholson" wrote in message
...
Our software developers are starting to use VMware workstation as a matter of course to run
various development environments at the same time. Our current standard of 32 bit Windows XP
limits us to 3GB of memory so we're considering switching to 64 bit Vista with 6GB memory.

At the same time, we are thinking about everything we can do to improve performance and as VMware
Workstation does (by default) a fair amount of disk swapping, I wondered if it would be a good
idea to specify the new PCs with two SATA drives and use Windows's native stripping.

Does that make sense?

Appreciate all the caveats about dangers of stripping but all the data used is on the network and
backed up inc. the VMs themselves so loosing the disk system due to hardware failure isn't too
worrying.

Cheers, Rob.

In message "Rob Nicholson"
was claimed to have wrote:

Our software developers are starting to use VMware workstation as a matter
of course to run various development environments at the same time. Our
current standard of 32 bit Windows XP limits us to 3GB of memory so we're
considering switching to 64 bit Vista with 6GB memory.

Depending on how many virtual machines you're running at once, and what
else is on the machine, 3GB is possibly acceptable, but more memory
always helps.

I'm running Vista x64 with 6GB and very comfortably run 4-6 VMs at once
for development and QA work.

At the same time, we are thinking about everything we can do to improve
performance and as VMware Workstation does (by default) a fair amount of
disk swapping, I wondered if it would be a good idea to specify the new PCs
with two SATA drives and use Windows's native stripping.

Does that make sense?

Appreciate all the caveats about dangers of stripping but all the data used
is on the network and backed up inc. the VMs themselves so loosing the disk
system due to hardware failure isn't too worrying.

Stripping won't help nearly as much as installing multiple drives and
limiting the number of VMs that use a drive at once.

Assuming that the users are running regular applications and/or
development tools from the primary hardware, you'll probably see better
performance with the second drive dedicated to VMWare.