I use VMware to run 64-bit guest OS’s for development and testing on my laptop. (Windows 7 only allows 32-bit guests, Windows 8 incorporates Hyper-V so this limitation will go away soon). One of the nice benefits of running a VM is that I can suspend and bring it back online in a matter of seconds each time I want to use the VM. Unfortunately, this comes with a negative side effect – the drive on the host that I am storing the VMs on thrashes for up to 15 minutes after VMWare was closed. At the end of the day, if I had just suspended my VM and tried to shut down the Windows 7 host OS, it would take 15 minutes to shut down the laptop.
Fortunately I found the fix on a SharePoint blog. Essentially you have add a setting to the VMWare config file. For VMWare 7, the file is located here: C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini. The setting that you need to add is mainMem.useNamedFile = “false”. One thing to be careful of is if you copy/paste from the web, the quotes on the “false” will be curly directional style rather than the straight kind that are required for the config file.
One other setting that I changed was in the main preferences for VMWare under the Memory tab, I set the “How should the system allocate memory for virtual machines?’ to “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”. I am able to do this since I have 16GB of RAM on my laptop, not sure if this is quite as feasible with less RAM.
