Virtual Machines Windows Services Modifier
I have recently been "playing" with virtual machines. I have looked at the Microsoft free offerings
as well as the VMware free products. From a user perspective I think the VMware software is impressive.
But do have an issue with the way VMware seems to reserve memory on my Windows XP box even if the
virtual machines are not running. This was most noticeable when I took the software and virtual machines
home and ran them on my older less capable computer (a P2.4 with 1GB of RAM).
By default VMware services are started automatically when the PC starts up. (There are 5 of these
services) This is fine if the virtual machine(s) are in use, but if we only want the virtual clients
to be run manually on demand, then we would of course like to have all the host pc RAM available for
normal use when the virtual machines aren't running!
My answer to this situation is in two parts:
Change the way the VMware services are started by using the Management Console to change them
from Automatic to a Manual startup. This means the services are present but not running.
I then run a very short Powershell script to start the services
and once they are started open the VMware server application. Yes it takes about 20 seconds longer to
start the VMware application this way but it works! I have a second script that will
shut the VMware services down again if you want to reclaim
RAM after using the virtual machines...
Prerequisites
You will need to have loaded Microsoft
Windows Powershell... which was released late 2006, on any workstation on which you want to run this script.
You will also need to set the Powershell script execution policy to: "set-executionpolicy remotesigned". The
prerequisites for Powershell on XP are Service Pack 2 and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0
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