VMware Workstation Tweaks

Toady when i was looking for a way to disable swap file creation on VMware Workstation VMs, came across a very interesting blog post related to VMware Workstation tweaks, VMWARE PERFORMANCE ENHANCING TWEAKS. This could be very useful at times so thought of making a note of it.

Tweak: Disable memory swap files .vmem files

In the VMware settings.ini file add the following line

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"

Settings.ini file is located file either at C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\
On Windows7:

or C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware Workstation\folders, depending on your operating system. 
For VMware Player: ## mainMem.useNamedFile = “FALSE” ## needs to be in the .vmx-file
For VMware Fusion on Mac and Linux instead of mainMem.useNamedFile you have to set mainMem.backing flag.

VMware Fusion Config files are located at:/Users/username/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/preferences and/Users/username/Library/Preferences/VMware Fusion/config

mainMem.backing = "swap"

Tweak: Disable log files for VM

Open your .vmx file in a text editor and add the following line:

logging = "FALSE"

Alternatively you can specify a different location to store the log file, if you ever need them:

log.filename = "c:\Windows\Temp\vm1.log"

Tweak: Disable Unity Mode

Unity might be a great feature for running virtual desktops  operating systems, but it is not the most useful for virtualizing server OS. An annoying sign of enabled unity is GuestAppsCache or caches folder with a large number of files in its appData-subfolder. In order to disable it for your VM, open your .vmx file in a text editor and add the following line:

isolation.tools.unity.disable="TRUE"

unity.allowCompositingInGuest="FALSE"

unity.enableLaunchMenu = "FALSE"

unity.showBadges = "FALSE"

unity.showBorders = "FALSE"

unity.wasCapable = "FALSE"

Tweak: Disk & Memory I/O Performance Optimization

Disable memory trimming:

MemTrimRate = "0"

Tweak: Disable page sharing:

sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"

Disable snapshots if you are not using them and prefer full backups,

snapshot.disabled = "TRUE"

Disable scale down of memory allocation:

MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"

That's it.... :)