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  5. Consolidating My Computers Onto A Single Laptop: Page 2 of 2
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Consolidating My Computers Onto A Single Laptop: Page 2 of 2

It's no secret that I probably spend way too much time in front of my computer. I use them for work and for play. Over the years, I have accumulated a number of laptops and desktop that I have pressed into use for various projects and with each new machine, I had yet another box to manage not to mention the power and space requirements to hold all of this hardware. But I don't need separate hardware in most cases, especially when I am doing software development or proof of concept work. What I r
Mike Fratto
March 15, 2010

I am finishing up my first week virtualized. It's been largely a success. I have only been running a single VM in workstation and I typically work in either the VM or the host OS. The only impacts I have seen are in cases where some application in the host OS is performing a lot of disk IO. For example, Outlook tends to burn up disk IO when auto archiving email messages, so I set auto archive to the end of the work day. Microsoft's Desktop search also uses a lot of disk IO, so I changed the idle timer before it will begin indexing. And of course, back-ups will burn disk IO, as well. Since I selected a laptop, I am pretty much stuck with a single disk system and I knew disk IO would be a potential problem when I started.

There are some steps I am going to investigate and report back on. The first is running multiple VMs in a "work mode." That's typically multiple Windows VM doing things which will largely chew up RAM and disk IO. I don't know what to expect there. Also,after  talking with Rick Vanover, a virtualization specialist who wrote Right-size Your Virtual Platform for the November issue of Network Computing, I am going to try to off-load the VM image to my NAS to see what the impact might be, though initial attempts don't look promising. I am getting a disk-read error in the VM's Bios when it boots, and I haven't troubleshot it.

It could be a problem with the VM image. I am having difficulty copying the modified VM back to my NAS successfully via both CIFS and iSCSI so the image may be hosed. Or there could be a network problem. A cursory look at the iSCSI traffic shows a number of re-transmits and out-of-order packets, which I find odd, since both the NAS and the laptop are on the same switch. The network should be fairly clean. I may have to press my Catalyst 3750 into service instead of my consumer grade Netgear Gb switch.

We'll see how it goes. I know that I am using a big hammer to create my VDI and I am sure that there alternatives that I am overlooking. If you know of any, let me know and I will take that currently unused hardware I know own and test out VDI on those.

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