Virtualization

Virtualization Tips and Optimization

Steve Bargelt — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:32:00 GMT

Very comprehensive article about running and optimizing VMs from Scott Hanselman...

posted a list of tips on Optimizing Performance on Virtual PC a while back, and I'm a big fan of Invirtus VM Optimizer. Jeff prefers to do the optimizations himself, but the time saved is worth the $70 for a tool like this. With the new Orcas March CTP available as a VM and weighing in at 9 gigs, I need to save all the time I can. Frankly, anything I can do to squeeze performance out of a VM is a good thing.

Source: Scott Hanselman's Computer Zen - Virtual PC Tips and Hardware Assisted Virtualization

Keep that Virtual Machine quiet!!

Steve Bargelt — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 10:37:00 GMT

Another awesome tip from AC.

[from this post: Telling your virtual machine to stop beeping and shut up! ]

… See, I configure all my virtual machines to not have a floppy drive and no sound… so when there’s a system alert/prompt, I get the standard system beep. That gets REAL annoying after the first 2 beeps, and it occurred to me that some people may not be aware that you can disable the system beep using two simple commands.

Open a command prompt and enter the following to stop the system beep:

C:\net stop beep

While this works, the beep will be re-enabled the next time the machine is rebooted. So what you want to do is configure it to never start back up:

C:\sc config beep start= disabled

Be sure to leave a space between the equals (=) sign and the word “disabled”.

TechEd 2006 - here we come

Steve Bargelt — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:19:00 GMT

Well I’m all set and ready for TechEd 2006 in Boston. There are approximately 12 of us going from the team I work on. Should be a blast.

One disappointment so far is that both Red Sox games on the weekend before TechEd are sold out! Damn! We really wanted to hit the Sunday (6/11) 2:05 game versus Texas. If anyone out there in the metaverse has extra tix for that game – let me know!

Related topic http://techedbloggers.net is up and running – very cool!

HOWTO: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Performance Out of Your Virtual PCs

Steve Bargelt — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 23:44:00 GMT

Andrew Connell has some of the most useful posts and HowTo articles out in the metaverse. This one is no exception.

[from this post: HOWTO: Squeeze Every Last Drop of Performance Out of Your Virtual PCs]

In this article, I'll outline some of the things I do with all my VPCs in order to keep them up to speed. Some of these things I've picked up along the way from my own experience, from the Virtual PC newsgroup, virtualization blogs, webcasts, and other sources. One disclaimer: I did receive a list of some performance things from someone who I wanted to give credit to, but he claimed he got the list from someone else and he wasn't sure who that was so he didn't want to claim credit for something that was someone else's work. Thus, some of the techniques listed here may not be original, so please don't take it that I'm trying to play them off as such.