VMWare Workstation Performance Settings

If you are hosting large performance intensive virtual machines in Windows 7 / Vista you will start to notice even if you allocate a large amount of memory to the virtual machine windows will not use it and will even start having paging issues trying to clean up memory used by the machine.  Below are settings for VMWare Workstation’s config.ini.  These settings are global so just make them once and they will effect every VM that you have.  What these settings are doing is telling windows to allocate the memory at boot time and not to dispose when the vm is not using it.  I noticed my VMs speed increase dramatically after these settings were changed.

prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = “true”

prefvmx.minVmMemPct = “100”

mainmem.useNamedFile = “false”

bios.bootdelay = “5000”

The config.ini file is commonly located in: C:Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataVMWareVMware Workstation