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Tips to Speed Up Virtual PC for Microsoft CRM

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Virtual PC’s can be the best way to demo Microsoft CRM as it allows you demo CRM with out using Terminal Services, a Web Connection or anything but laptop and the image.

I get complaints from sales people and sales executives on the performance of VPC all the time. So the purpose of this article is to help you speed up Microsoft CRM running in VPC. Some of these tuning things are VPC generic and some are specific to Microsoft CRM.

For the purpose of this conversation, we have two different things to talk about. One involves things that have to do with the “Host” and others have things that have to do with the “Guest.”

  • The host is your physical machine.
  • The guest is the operating system running in VPC.

Physical Hardware.. 1

Existing Laptop.. 2

Dedicated Demo Laptop.. 2

Dedicated Demo Server. 2

Host Operating System... 2

External Hard Drive Settings. 3

Compression.. 3

Defragmentation.. 3

Guest Settings. 4

Physical Hardware

Realizing every partner has different needs and requirements, I am going to break us down in three different scenarios.

If you do NOT have a machine with at least 2 GB of RAM and a FAST External Hard Drive, DO NOT DEMO MICROSOFT CRM TO ANY PROSPECTS. Period. You will do nothing but apologize for the applications performance and it will have nothing to do with real world performance.

If you are a new partner or do not have a machine, you can buy a hard drive for, you should budget about $2,500 – $3,000 for a demo laptop. Ignore everything like Bluetooth, DVD Burner, etc… If you want to go the extreme I used to go with the Server, that setup was about 4,000 or so. (Monitor, Cases and everything included.)

Existing Laptop

Use this if you have an existing laptop that has 2 GB of RAM. If you do not buy a dedicated Demo Laptop, at least spend the 200 or so and buy a dedicated demo hard drive for your everyday laptop. It does not have to be very big, but should replace your main hard drive on demo days. You should also buy an external USB Hard Drive.

Dedicated Demo Laptop

You should have a dedicated demo laptop setup to run VPC and nothing else. A typical setup I have seen is:

· Dell Latitude D600

· 2 GHz Centrino Processor

· 2 GB of RAM

· 30 GB Internal Hard Drive

· 250 GB External Hard Drive

The two most important things on this are the external hard drive and the RAM.

Dedicated Demo Server

When I was a partner, I went to the extreme. This setup is awesome if you want to show the Dynamics-GP integration, SharePoint, and LOTS and LOTS of stuff at the same time. If you are a bit more extreme, my last setup was:

· IBM X225 Server

· Dual 2.0 Ghz Xenon Processors

· 4 GB of RAM

· 3 Hard Drives @ 10,000 RPM SCSI

In that setup I was running Virtual Server vs. Virtual PC to take advantage of the Dual Processor. I used www.newworldcase.com to make a custom flight case with wheels that I used to cart this thing for several hundred thousand air miles a year.

Host Operating System

Now that we have hardware, lets talk about your host operating system. I have a spare hard drive I use for the host OS for demos. You know what is installed on it? Nothing. Not Word, Not Adobe Acrobat, Not MSN Messenger.

So lets look at your host OS right now. What is running on it? Here are some things I have seen:

· IIS

· SQL Server

· Outlook

· Word

· MSN Messenger

· Office Communicator,

· Google Desktop Search

· MSN Desktop Search

· Trillian

· AOL Instant Messenger

· Yahoo Messenger

· Screen Capture Apps

· And the list goes on….

Think about this for a second or two and look at your system tray. How many things do you have down there? Take that and times ir by 50 megs per item…. Wow… There goes 200 megs of RAM. You know where that forces VPC? Yup… The dreaded swap file. (Which is slower than RAM.) So turn all of that stuff off before you demo the VPC. I normally use a second hard drive with nothing installed on it. That way I have all of my stuff without having to shut everything down between images.

Also, use the Pause feature in VPC to Pause VPC when running PowerPoint and Media Player. (So when you are doing presentations or showing a video.)

External Hard Drive Settings

First off, your external USB Hard Drive should NOT be one of those ones that uses the power from the USB port. Your external hard drive should be one that is powered by AC power and should be as fast in RPM’s as you can find. I personally use the Maxtor One Touch and have been very impressed with it.

Compression

I know this will defy logic. Make sure the external hard drive is formatted in NTFS. And also make sure the directory that will contain your VPC files is compressed. (So it should show up as blue.)

Defragmentation

I use PerfectDisk from Raxco Software to run what they call a Smart Placement on my External hard drive weekly. The less fragmentation the better your performance will be. This product rocks… I like it much better and it makes my VPC’s run much faster than any other software I have tried. (I got a copy free as they are a local company that dropped off software to all of the Microsoft TS’s in the DC office one day.)

Guest Settings

Before we even look at the guest OS, lets look at the settings that are stored in the VMC file.

  1. Location of the VMC file. I personally make my VMC file in the same place as my VHD file. (In the compressed directory.) This will make sure that your VSV (Saved State File) and Undo File are all in the same place. This also helps when you make your drive portable between machines. (So I can start and suspend a machine on one laptop and resume my machine on a second latop.)
  2. Amount of RAM allocated to the Guest. This is a fine line to walk. When I run a VPC for demo prep on my “dirty” guest, I allocated about ½ my RAM or 1024 to the guest. When I run it on my clean machine, I do so with 1500 or so in RAM for the guest. You need to make sure you don’t choke you host machine’s processes, so unless you have a drive like I do that is pristine, allocate ½ of your RAM to the Guest.
  3. Networking. I have found that the virtual machine runs a lot faster when you are connected to a network. So I normally select the Local Only as an option under the network settings. (So your guest machine thinks that there is a network attached even if your host isn't netoworked.)
  4. Pre-Cache Tool: Use the Microsoft CRM Pre Cache Tool that Joris wrote. (https://blogs.msdn.com/Joris_Kalz) This should be started for EVERY Demo
  5. Learn how to use Suspend State. A lot of the times, I will start the demo image at home, do a dry run before leaving the house and then suspend state. When I get to the prospect’s offices, I will then use the Resume feature to do the demo.

The next time we will cover more of what can go wrong with VPC and Microsoft CRM in a demo environment, how to recover and what to do to prevent it from happening again. Other topics we will cover around VPC’s will include Differencing Disks and other topics that you would like to see covered.

 

Do you have any speed enhancements for VPC? Lets hear em... :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    Hi Ben,
    thanks for the tips, VPC-demos and speed are a constant pain. what i just can't understand is the compression thing. how could using a compressed NTFS-folder influence performance in a positive way?

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 27, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 30, 2006
    Alspo, a SATA drive for a laptop is much faster than Firewire or USB.  I had to make mine, but today you can buy a SATA external.

    Mike

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2006
    Mike,
    I wish I had a laptop with SATA and 90% of my partners don't... So that is an option if you have a new kick'ing machine... :-)

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2006
    RJ,
    In case you had not noticed, I do work for Microsoft... And there are a number of different ways to turn off the Messenger.... (I will share it about when SalesLogix gets a product roadmap or FrontRange actually has a combined GoldMine / HEAT Product. Which you and I both know have been promised for the past five years, I think that little annoyance pales in comparison to the little Messenger in your system tray.)
    Now if I where to look down at the system tray, you may have one or you may have 30 things there. I use 50 megs as a rule of thumb. You could have SQL consuming WAY more than 50 megs. My copy of Communicator consumes a TON of RAM. Does everything there take 50 megs of RAM? No. If you average is that a reasonable average? I think so...
    Welcome to the blog.
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    April 22, 2006
    I do many of those things, with one notable exception:  I put the .VPC and .VHD files on different drives.  

    Your undo file is created where your .VHC file is, so it helps to have one drive writing and the other drive reading data concurrently.  If you're using multiple VPCs, it's even more important to spread out that I/O load between multiple drives.  Depending on the demonstration, our team generally uses two, three, or more drives.

  • Anonymous
    May 08, 2006
    Fred,
    I don't do that because I like to move my USB hard drive between machines... It allows me to save state on machine A and move to machine B.... If I kept one machine, I would be all about keeping them seperate.. Thanks for stopping by!

    Ben

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2006
    Ben,

    You wrote:
    Learn how to use Suspend State. A lot of the times, I will start the demo image at home, do a dry run before leaving the house and then suspend state. When I get to the prospect’s offices, I will then use the Resume feature to do the demo.

    Just a question..
    What happens with the external disk, does it also resumes after comming back from suspend state ? Do you leave the VPC running when going in suspend state?

    Jeroen.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2006
    Jeroen,
    Saving State stop the VPC in it's tracks. Very simliar to Hibernate. One the state is saved, you can resume with no problems from an external HD... I do it all the time.

    Thanks
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2006
    WOW. We had some awesome turn out for the LiveMeeting. And the questions just kept coming. I lost track...

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2006
    Hi,

    Thanks for the tips. Appearently the defregmantation will do do trick for me. I'm using VPC not stand alone but in a multi environment (more than one vpc). I't seems to work fine on my HP Compaq nc6120 with 2 gig. I also tried the new T2300 processor (dual core) but it rather seemed slower. Maybe i should use virtual server in stead of vpc in these cases.

    My trick for the community is doing a warm up at the prospects site. You have to be earlier to set up your machinery but you will sure benefit from it. Doing a warm up at home and than save state sometimes doesn't work for me.

    Another tip is to be sure you every time connect your external hard drive to the same port (usb) otherwise the virtual machines will not be recognized.

    Max Beuker

  • Anonymous
    June 19, 2006
    Max,
    To the best of my knowledge, Dual Core is something VS takes advantage of, but not VPC.

    ANYTIME you are doing a demo, you should be there 15-30 minutes early. This gives you time to get the Enviroment ready, projector working, etc... Saving state works MOST of the time for me, but there are times it does not work.

    I normally use either of my USB ports. As long as the drive letter doesn't change, you should be ok. :-)

    Thanks for the comment!
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2006
    Hi Ben,

    Thanks for your really helpful article.

    I am running a Pentium 4 laptop with 2.60GHZ and 2gb RAM. I also have a 200 gb external fast HD with 80gb free (I inhereted it packed full of other stuff I can't delete).

    My Virtual PC set up is as follows:
    Virtual PC Server: 1023 MB Ram
    Virtual PC Client: 496 MB Ram

    Both "Local Only" networking so as not to disturb any LAN connection the laptop is running.

    The Laptop is also my work laptop, but when I try to run the Client, I first close down everything I can on the PC prior to starting the VPC Client.

    At this setting, the Virtual PC Server goes quite well in a demo using the ie connection, but the VPC Client running Outlook runs little faster than a rock (about 1.5 minutes to display a Contact from the list).

    Any assistance would help.

    Steve

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2006
    Steve,
    My advice? Ditch the two VMs and run only the one. You will notice a HUGE bump in speed. Give it about 1200 or so megs of RAM and you will be suprised... :-)

    HTH
    Ben

  • Anonymous
    July 06, 2006
    Thanks Ben,

    It was my understanding that you can't run the outlook client on the same virtual machine as the Virtual CRM Server.

    Are you suggesting that you can? Or are you suggesting to only demo the web client? CRM running in Outlook is an excellent drawcard.

    The web client runs very well on the laptop Virtual PC Server.

    Steve

  • Anonymous
    July 07, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 04, 2006
    Ben, Can you please advise on how to bypass EDW ? What is EDW by the way ?

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2006
    In regards to the compression of the directory holding the image.  This does defy all logic.  Can someone add some insite as to how this speeds things up?

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 06, 2006
    "In regards to the compression of the directory holding the image.  This does defy all logic.  Can someone add some insite as to how this speeds things up?" IIRC it is to do with the principle that the NTFS compression process is more efficient that disk writing speed.  The compressed file is smaller, so you sacrifice some CPU cycles (compressing) to save disk access time (by reading and writing smaller files).  Apparently this works out in favour of using compression in many cases.

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  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2007
    Can you send post the link on PPT for webcast on tips Demo with VPC...I can't find it...?

  • Anonymous
    November 07, 2007
    Dan, I trashed my old external HD... And lost a bunch of data... Those slides included... Sorry Ben