philipnet

Through experimentation I found that pre-allocating VMWare disks is the best course of action. Sure, you might over allocate disks sizes on the host, but that can save having to restore a from backup when things go wrong.

I recent had the opportunity to experiment with allocating disk or not allocating disks under VMWare. I was under the impression that pre-allocating VMWare disks was the preferred option, but I wanted to know why. But I found out at my cost.

I wanted to build another DC on my test network. A reasonably high spec PC running VMWare was to be the host and a low 512MB RAM, 10GB and SCSI HDD was to be the VMWare machine.

I installed Window Server 2003 Standard Edition, set it up, added it to the domain and was set to go. I thought that installing SP2 would be prudent before making it a DC; and so I set that going.

Unfortunately half hour later, I was greeted with a BSOD and a rather lengthy memory dump. So I reset the VMWare machine and tried to repair Windows. It wasn’t having any of it, and so half hour later I gave up and did a complete re-install.

Thinking something just went wrong with the first attempt, I updated the drivers before installing SP2 for the second time. The drivers were up to date, so I installed SP2, and thirty minutes latter was greeted by another BSOD.

I was getting rather fed up of this. So I deleted the VMWare hard drive and created a new one – all allocated – for the third attempt.

This time it worked. No BSODs and now one happy DC!