What are general strategies to make vmware workstation faster? I am running Fedora 10 inside it and recently it has become very slow. I have allocated around 1.4 GB ram for virtual machine.
My desktop has: Intel Core i5 3.2 GHz. RAM: 4GB. HDD: 300 GB. Running 32bit Windows 7
Can antivirus be causing this?
Firstly, make sure your CPU has VT turned on (Check in the BIOS or through this tool.
VT is mainly there for 64 bit virtualisation support and people say it makes the VM go faster, but, I haven't honestly seen it (as per a question I asked ages ago...).
I would say that your CPU is great - that is unlikely to be the issue.
Memory could be bad - I would check your host machine has at least 40% free and that you are not paging too much as that may be causing issues.
Hard Drive - AV could be a problem - I would make sure you exclude your VM folder from the AV active checker as it may not be tuned for that, however, anything IO heavy on your host will affect speed.... I recommend you open Resource Monitor(or even just task manager) and take a look at your disk IO to make sure your disk isn't at 100% -
If your disk is at very high usage, I recommend offloading virtualisation to a different physical disk, or just upgrading to a SSD.
In my opinion SSD should do the job. If you are using <4GB RAM on your VM be sure to use 32 bit version of your os.
