Freecare Spiritwise wrote:At least with a physical disk I can use a tool like Acronis on it. Can that be done with a virtual disk? Or am I hosed on having a 80 GB drive C:?
Normally Win7 can just expand the partition? If not, just use something like gparted to expand it for you (same as you would on a physical machine) - just download the .iso and boot the VM from that.
You can't expand the partition you booted from in Windows. I had installed the wrong version of SQL server too (which takes forever to install!) so I just re-did the machine from scratch. I guess the first time around I picked "Express" settings since I was just playing around. The second time I set the partition to 160 GB which should be plenty.
Yeah I guess I can boot anything I can boot from a CD/DVD in the virtual machine, like my Ultimate Boot CD and all the Acronis CDs. I'll have to keep that in mind.
I have a few older projects that compile with VS 2003 and VS 2005 that I'm not really interested in converting now, so I'm setting up a Windows XP x64 VM now. So far it's really fast too.
You need to make the virtual drive bigger, and then use whatever means you would normally use to extend the partition. There's a link to various tools in that knowledge base post. If it's Windows 7 you may be able to use the Windows disk manager tool to extend the volume.
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installs and is fullly updated in about 20 minutes (with all the reboots) and Windows Server 2008 R2 takes about 5 minutes longer. This is under VMWare Workstation. I gave my main work VM 2 cores and it seems to make full use of them.
As long as I keep everything 64 bit the performance is absolutely ridiculous. I read somewhere that AMD isn't very good at supporting 32 bit virtualization. At least that's true for my AMD rig. Intel's top of the line was 5 times more and it's questionable whether I'd get _any_ performance premium over AMD's flagship.
The cool thing is that I have Virtual PC installed on this machine and all my pre-existing VMs are still at my fingertips. They're slow as shit on this new rig but it's nice having the dozen or so VMs I've been carting around the last few years.
