Maximising host and guest machines

[Makcrellon]

Hey all,

I'm currently running VM WS 8.01 on an i7 940XM laptop with Windows 7 64-bit (16GB RAM, no page file and two hard disks: C -  256GB SSD and D - 500 7200 RPM Disk).  VMWare is installed on the C: drive.

At present I have my Windows 2008 server test guest machines on the SSD, each configured with 1 processor and 1 core and 2GB RAM.  My Windows 2003 server test guest machines all reside on my second 500Gb 7200 RPM hard disk.

Not sure what the best practise is here, but I was also interested in the likes of the paging files on the guest machines, if we should leave the OS to manage this, or set it manually.  Is there a best practise for managing memory and resources to get the best performance?

Thanks.

Mack

[continuum]

In my experience running a Windows-VMware host without pagefile is a bad idea.

Regarding pagefiles in the guests ...
I used to assign a second disk in nonpersistant modes to store the pagefiles but later I found out it was not worth the effort

[Makcrellon]

Yeah that's why I'm asking, because I've been using it for a few days and it's pretty fast.  With 16Gb RAM available and my hosts powered up it's using 10Gb RAM, so I was wasn't sure what impact it'd have.

Thanks a lot