Speed-up your virtual machine created with VMware Player

20 Mar 2012 Matteo Mattei virtualization tricks vmware

If your virtual machine created with VMware Player becomes very slow and takes a long time to complete some operations it’s time to improve its performance! Close your VM, and open the *.vmx file with a text editor. Then add at the end of the file the following lines:

mainMem.useNamedFile = "FALSE"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
MemTrimRate = 0
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = "FALSE"
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"
prefvmx.minVmMemPct = "100"

Make sure to not duplicate the keywords (in case you already have some lines set) otherwise the VM will not start. The above lines totally reserve the memory requested by the VM to the guest system and avoid to continuously ask to the host (and so to the swap file) for new memory chunks.

Try yourself and give me a feedback!