My nMP 6core Arrived Today -- View from a non-Pro user

[carrerascott]

A few pics as promised. On left is screen connected to a PC Server (work). Right 2 screens are connected to the Mac Pro, running Fusion as well. The Mac Pro pretty much disappears on the desk. But it's close enough to caress.

Oh and I have these on my TrekDesk treadmill desk so I can get some exercise while working.

Not sure why one shows sideways in the preview -- if you click it, it's right side up.

 

[AidenShaw]

VM performance is material to me.

Some performance tips for VMs:

• thick disks can be much faster than thin disks ("thick" disks are "allocate all disk space now")
• consider using thick disks for the system and work areas, and thin disks for less active files
• consider moving archive and less active disks off the main SSD and onto slower storage if your SSD space is limited
• don't split disks into 2 GiB chunks - much more overhead.
• minimize use of snapshots - each snapshot adds overhead (both access time and disk space). Long snapshot chains make for very long boot times, and can have horrible random small write performance.
• don't defragment thin disks - either from the host or from the guests, and definitely don't defragment a disk with snapshots
• don't rename or move any file that's part of a snapshot chain - the files contain metadata with links and timestamps to adjacent snapshots (the VMware-vdiskmanager utility does have a safe rename function).
• if you're using thin disks and/or snapshots and the snapshots keep growing and the machine slows downs - use the "clone" operation to make a clean copy with all of the snapshots collapsed into the base file, and then delete the original.
• never delete or move any vmdk file that's ever been seen by a snapshot. Even if you remove the file from the VM, VMware validates the entire snapshot chain at every power on - and it will fail to boot if a "deleted" virtual hard disk is not available (reason - you wouldn't be able to revert to some earlier snapshots, therefore the VM is broken).

 

[analog guy]

All Core i7 have all three virtualization assists - so not surprising that it is much faster than the 3,1.

little bit old now, but a question for you:
will a core i7 typically run VMs faster than one of the Xeons (4-core) in the nMP?

my MP3,1 has Xeons (older, of course) with 8 real cores (2xquad-core). my late 2013 iMac is a huge step up in VM performance.

wondering how the nMP might stack up to the iMac in terms of VM performance.

thanks!

 

[Michaelgtrusa]

A few pics as promised. On left is screen connected to a PC Server (work). Right 2 screens are connected to the Mac Pro, running Fusion as well. The Mac Pro pretty much disappears on the desk. But it's close enough to caress.

Oh and I have these on my TrekDesk treadmill desk so I can get some exercise while working.

Not sure why one shows sideways in the preview -- if you click it, it's right side up.

Nice pics.

 

[TjeuV]

A few pics as promised. On left is screen connected to a PC Server (work). Right 2 screens are connected to the Mac Pro, running Fusion as well. The Mac Pro pretty much disappears on the desk. But it's close enough to caress.

Oh and I have these on my TrekDesk treadmill desk so I can get some exercise while working.

Not sure why one shows sideways in the preview -- if you click it, it's right side up.

That's awesome! So you work while walking? How long do you keep up/how fast?/How much weight did you lose while doing so?

 

[alainking]

In the original post, you mentioned that the VM is running XP. If this is the 32 bit version (which mostly is true for people using it in VMs), it will not see any more than just over 3.25 gb of RAM - 32 bit limitation so don't worry about allocating more than that to it (4gb according to official MS documents.

Also depending on which version, you won't get much improvement from assigning too many cores (link here).

If you can, put the VM on an SSD as mentioned early.

Enjoy the machine.

 

[AidenShaw]

little bit old now, but a question for you:
will a core i7 typically run VMs faster than one of the Xeons (4-core) in the nMP?

my MP3,1 has Xeons (older, of course) with 8 real cores (2xquad-core). my late 2013 iMac is a huge step up in VM performance.

wondering how the nMP might stack up to the iMac in terms of VM performance.

thanks!

The current Xeons and Core i7 are at the same level of virtualization support - you should see comparable performance, except for any clock speed differences.

The Xeon can be configured with more cores and more memory, which can be a help for many or larger VMs. It will also let you use more vCPUs in the guests.

 

[analog guy]

The current Xeons and Core i7 are at the same level of virtualization support - you should see comparable performance, except for any clock speed differences.

thank you for confirming this. i appreciate it.

my VM performance on the core i7 is great, but allocating 2 virtual cores to the VM only leaves me with 6 virtual cores.

with the 6c nMP the same allocation per VM allows me to run 2 VMs and still have 8 virtual cores available.

thanks!