Re: WDSC in VM

 
Hi Joe,
 
you wrote:

If this DOES work even marginally, I'm going to definitely go out and spend> 
the money for a terabyte SAN, and then I can store images on the SAN and> 
load them into the high-performance workstation whenever I need them.> > The 
biggest issue is disk space. For whatever reason you cannot increase> the 
size of a virtual machine's primary disk drive (although you CAN add and> 
remove secondary drives). That being the case, I need an 8GB VM to run XP> 
Pro SP2 and WDSC7AE.> 

It depends on how you configure your virtual disks. If you use a virtual disk 
file, then you don't have allocate all diskspace before. There is a checkbox in 
the "create a new VM" wizard which allows you to not preallocate.
For example a 200 Gb virtual disk that is not preallocated will occupy no more 
than 26 Mb when it is still empty. When you install software in the VM, the 
virtual disk file will grow automatically. Of course this can have performance 
issues, since the fileblocks of the virtual disk file will not be written 
contiguous if other programs also write to the same physical disk.
 
You can defragment and shrink inside the VM when you install the VMWare Tools 
in it. You always should install those tools in the VM, they add enhancements 
to your VM.
To make copying VM's between computers (or copying to usb sticks) a little 
easier, I also check the 2Gb split option most of the times.
I don't know if splitting the virtual disk has performance penalties, but if so 
I never noticed them.
 
Best regards,
Arco Simonse