General best practices for Virtual Machine configuration

The suggestions below should always be attempted on a test environment that closely matches the production environment. Review the Sage 500 ERP compatibility guide related to the same version of the application,  for additional best practices for SQL Server configurations.

Virtual environments tend to run slower than non virtual environments. The options below can help increase performance on the guest machine. Multiple guest virtual machines running on the same host machines is not a recommended practice and will likely cause performance degradation among the guest virtual machines.

The below suggestions should be performed on the host machine:

Upgrade RAM

Add more RAM to host system and allocate more RAM to the guest virtual machine. By adding more memory, more RAM will be available to the guest virtual machine(s).   This will reduce swapping on your host and guest operating systems. 

Another option is to allocate or reallocate RAM from one virtual machine to another. If the host machine currently has substantial RAM, the guest virtual machine could benefit from having more memory allocated. Determine  how much RAM each machine is using. If one machine is doing more swapping, consider allocating more RAM to that machine

Upgrade CPU

CPU processes all the data from both the host operating system and the guest virtual system(s). Faster CPUs and additional CPUs always provide faster processing.

 

Upgrade Hard Disk(s)

Faster hard disks is another way to increase virtual machine performance. Additionally you add more coupled with faster disk drives.

Employ RAID arrays to provide redundancy and performance (depending on the type of RAID you select).

Enable hardware acceleration

1.  Start \ Run, type Desk.cpl, click OK.
2. On the Settings tab, click Advanced. 
3.  On the Troubleshoot tab, move the Hardware acceleration slider to Full, and then click OK twice

 

Disable Windows visual effects

1. From Control Panel \ System \ Advanced Tab \ Performance  \ Settings
2. Select Adjust for best performance
3. Click OK