When VPC was first released by Microsoft (after it acquired the product from Connectrix) there were some significant performance problems running it. This means service packs for both your host OS and for VPC. I use my own VPC box exclusively for testing and nothing else, and it pays to do so in terms of usability.Ĥ. This also means you should shut down all other VMs when installing a new guest OS. That’s because the Setup process for guest OSes usually runs slower on a VM than it does on a similarly equipped (same RAM, disk, processor) physical machine. Not running anything unnecessary on your host OS is especially important when you’re installing a guest OS to create a new virtual machine. Disable any services on your host OS like the Indexing service that can be processor-intensive in their operation. Any programs or services running on your host OS will drain CPU cycles away from your virtual machines, so don’t use your host OS for anything other than providing a platform for running your virtual machines on. Use your host OS exclusively for running VPC. I also partition my first drive so I can multiboot my box to other platforms I’m testing and which may not work so well running under Virtual PC.ģ. I have three 80 GB SATA drives in my test system with my XP host OS on the first drive and the other two drives configured as RAID 0 (disk striping) for top performance. And again, hardware RAID can improve even further on this. VPC disk images (.vhd files) should be stored on a separate drive from your host operating system to get best performance. My only hurdle in getting things up and running was the RAID drivers for my machine weren’t compatible with XP (the hardware is certified for Windows Server 2003 but not Windows XP) but I was able to obtain a driver for a newer version of my RAID controller from the manufacturer that let XP recognize the SATA drive system during Setup.Ģ. I initially thought of using a dual-processor machine for testing but unfortunately VPC will only use one CPU on an SMP machine, though VPC’s big brother Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 can make use of multiple processors (see here for a comparison of the different features of VPC and VS). My own VPC test machine is server-grade hardware, a 3.2 GHz P4 with 2 GB RAM and hardware RAID. The minimum hardware requirements for VPC are listed here, but you should try to exceed these requirements by a large margin for best performance, that is, a fast CPU, lots of RAM, and good hard drive subsystem. Run your host OS on appropriate hardware. My article builds on Ricky’s excellent introduction to the subject by giving you seven tips on how you can get the best performance from your VPC setup.ġ. Ricky Magalhaes covered installing Virtual PC in two previous articles on that are found here and here. Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 (VPC) is a software virtualization tool that lets you run multiple guest operating systems within virtual machines on a single computer running Windows XP Professional or Windows 2000 Professional as a host operating system.
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