We're a software development shop, and we're experimenting with VMWare Server 2 on Windows XP Professional/32 (corporate standard, can't get away from it) with Windows 2008 x64 as guest for 64-bit testing. We're using VS2008. This is obviously on 64-bit hardware. The host has 4GB RAM.
When we allocate 2GB to the VM, it runs fairly acceptably. However, when we allocate 3GB, a build which at best timing on 2GB took 6 minutes, takes up to 20 (twenty) minutes and the physical disk is thrashing.
System properties says 3.5xGB RAM, "Physical Address Extensions". boot.ini does not have the /3GB switch.
Anyone have pointers on how to increase the performance? Add /3GB? Any configuration of VMWare I'm overlooking (disk policy already set for "Performance", XP configured to "Optimize for background services")? Statically assigning all disk space vs. dynamically growing made little to no difference.
Somewhat related issue - if the guest is left idle for some time, the build takes 15-20 minutes as well; is there a way to prevent this idling? Is the guest being swapped out of RAM?
TIA.