Hi,
I recently installed VMWare Workstation on a Debian Wheezy host, with as guest OS'es both a windows xp and windows 7 plain vanilla install. Both guests have the VMTools, and no other software (no antivirus, etc.).
Both guest machines seem to cause a lot of disk I/O (at least every two seconds there is a disk access, even when idle). This does not seem to be normal
I disabled the shared folders, floppy disks, cd-rom drive (and autorun). Only a scsi virtual drive remains. I disabled file indexing in windows 7. The little disk icon in the bottom of the status bar still blinks every while, and the only process that is accessing the disk according to the task manager (in che windows client) is csrss.exe.
I really have no clue what is going on. I changed the .vmx files to include the
MemTrimRate = "0"
sched.mem.pshare.enable = "FALSE"
prefvmx.useRecommendedLockedMemSize = "TRUE"
mainmem.backing = "swap"
lines as suggested in the help files, which didn't do anything for me.
As both guests have the same problem, I suppose maybe the problem lies with vmware.
I am sure the disk access is caused by vmware, as iotop (on the host) shows that the only process accessing the disk is "vmware-vmx -s vmx.stdio.keep=~vmware/windows7/Windows 7.vmx". Most disk access are writes.
Can someone help me what to do to stop the disk trashing? Has the fact that I'm using snapshots something to do with it? I've attached a .vmx file, if that can be of any help.
Kind regards, and thanks in advance,
Bill Carson