I’m looking for some advice on ways to improve the performance of my VMs. I do have a need to run multiple VMs simultaneously such as when I test a new MS Project Server environment (I need a Domain Controller, a SQL server, a Project Server, and a user workstation). But when running multiple VMs their performance severely degrades. Running single VMs is not an issue.
I’m running VMware Workstation 10.0.1 build-1379776.
My host OS is Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit. The host OS is installed on a SSD and its swap file is also on the SSD.
My mother board is a Gigabyte GA-X79-UD5 running an Intel i7-3930K CPU and has 16GB of RAM. I have 4 spare memory slots for upgrades if need be.
I have checked Task Manager and Resource Monitor and the CPU is not taxed and I still have some free memory so swapping is (probably) not the issue.
The disk where my VMs are stored seems to be the bottleneck with access requests constantly queued as seen in these graphs from Resource Monitor.
I have set up disk for the VMs as a RAID 0 disk hoping that the striping of data across two disks would improve the performance (the disks I’m using are 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 3) but no luck.
Short of installing each VMs files on their own unique disk, or purchasing hugely expensive SSDs for all of the VM files is there anything I can do to improve their performance.
Thank You