I remember installing old versions of Quake that took forever. I remember installing Microsoft Office on dozens of floppies - that was sloooow. But today I’m trying to install VMWare - just installing the server software took forever - now I’m creating a virtual ‘disk’ and looking at the progress bar it’ll be sometime tomorrow before this thing is baked. And I haven’t even started installing the guest OS…
I have a huge CVS repository I need to convert to SVN and I was hoping to work with it in a VM but I think I’m going to go hunt down an old machine and just install some flavor of *nix from scratch and skip the VM middleman.
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4 Comments
I know this might sound crazy, but I suspect there is something going wrong with your machine more than the software. I have been running various flavors of VMware on both windows, linux and the ESX server system and the only issue I have seen with it taking a long time has been with large disks on the ESX system. Creating a 30 GB disk within either windows or linux using vmware server 1.0.x has been very quick. It could be that your disk partition is almost full or highly fragmented. What ever your issue might be, I want to encourage you to not write virtualization off as it has been a huge help to my daily work style. I have found that OS installs in the VM environment can be twice as fast as installing on physical hardware, though I don’t understand why.
I hope you are able to get things worked out.
I hadn’t considered fragmentation - but that might be an issue - I rarely defrag the disks on my work machine.
Next time I may create a fresh partition with Gparted and then create the virtual drive there and see if it is faster. Right now I’m about 50% into installing Ubuntu server and things are going smooth!
I certainly won’t give up on VMWare
Fragmentation might be it. Or a full hard drive slows down my VM.
On a note, VMware’s site has a lot of prebuilt OS’s (Appliances) that are plug and play.
http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/directory/
They come in most flavors of Linux. You can probably save a bunch of time using a prebuilt one instead of doing a full install.
Also be aware that VM’s in general are kind of slow and resource intensive since there is a layer of software between the OS and the hardware (VM ware is pretty good with RAM usage). So if you are going to need to do some processor intensive stuff you might want to consider using another box.
Thanks Cozmo - I was aware of the prebuilt systems. That’s probably one of the coolest features of VMWare IMO. The install seems to have gone OK - right now I’m upgrading everything over apt (oh how I love apt). So far it doesn’t appear to be killing my system. I think the slow install may have been an issue with the disk as Reuben suggested.