Using Delphi in Virtual machine for a month

[Guest]

I see, @Mike Torrettinni, tanks!

 

Just visited a client where the IT-admin uses WM-Ware. In his opinion WM-Ware works better than VirtualBox. Anyone having that "general" experience too? I'll make an unscientific test.

I think my problem is that i have two "Monitors" side-by side on my one physical screen. I can verify that when i get back to my workstation in a week.

If that's the case then i'll put an old cheap 2nd screen beside my 1500€ super-thingy. But if 4K (the res of the super-thingy, no scaling mind it's huge) is the problem then i'm a bit in a pinch.

Perhaps WM-Ware comes with better screen handling for my comb of host-guest.

[Bill Meyer 337]

1 hour ago, Dany Marmur said:

I see, @Mike Torrettinni, tanks!

 

Just visited a client where the IT-admin uses WM-Ware. In his opinion WM-Ware works better than VirtualBox. Anyone having that "general" experience too? I'll make an unscientific test.

I think my problem is that i have two "Monitors" side-by side on my one physical screen. I can verify that when i get back to my workstation in a week.

If that's the case then i'll put an old cheap 2nd screen beside my 1500€ super-thingy. But if 4K (the res of the super-thingy, no scaling mind it's huge) is the problem then i'm a bit in a pinch.

Perhaps WM-Ware comes with better screen handling for my comb of host-guest.

I sometimes use VM-Ware, and my main complaint with it is the plethora of files it creates. VBox is much simpler to manage. That said, I have not done any critical comparison for performance, but with our very large and slow-building project here, the build times reported by those on VM-ware correlate closely to those we see on VBox. One reason I prefer VBox is that the video driver in VBox has always seemed to be a better design. When I tried VM-ware years ago, the finite choices in resolution offered at that time were purely unacceptable.

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

31 minutes ago, Bill Meyer said:

my main complaint with it is the plethora of files it creates.

What files are you referring to? Perhaps I have a different meaning for plethora.

[John Kouraklis 94]

1 hour ago, Bill Meyer said:

I sometimes use VM-Ware, and my main complaint with it is the plethora of files it creates. VBox is much simpler to manage. That said, I have not done any critical comparison for performance, but with our very large and slow-building project here, the build times reported by those on VM-ware correlate closely to those we see on VBox. One reason I prefer VBox is that the video driver in VBox has always seemed to be a better design. When I tried VM-ware years ago, the finite choices in resolution offered at that time were purely unacceptable.

There were some issues with screen resolution but v.15 I am using behaves correctly. They have also fixed the scaling issues with 4K/non-4K monitors they had in v.14

[John Kouraklis 94]

1 hour ago, Uwe Raabe said:

What files are you referring to? Perhaps I have a different meaning for plethora.

I believe he refers to the files VMWare generates for a VM. By default, it splits the VM in multiple files but if I recall correctly you can change this behaviour and instruct VMWare to create on big file. 

But I don't feel confortable having one 300GB file

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

29 minutes ago, John Kouraklis said:

By default, it splits the VM in multiple files but if I recall correctly you can change this behaviour and instruct VMWare to create on big file. 

That is the first setting I am changing for a new VM.

[Bill Meyer 337]

22 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

That is the first setting I am changing for a new VM.

In what way? I am accustomed to VBox, where I usually have a VDI file for my C:\ drive, another for S:\ (our local convention for source), and in some, a third virtual drive for local data.

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

17 minutes ago, Bill Meyer said:

where I usually have a VDI file for my C:\ drive, another for S:\ (our local convention for source), and in some, a third virtual drive for local data.

That is the same in VMware - one file per virtual disk. Each virtual disk has a setting where you can decide if the disk shall be split into several files or just one. The default is split, but I prefer it the other way.

[Bill Meyer 337]

2 minutes ago, Uwe Raabe said:

That is the same in VMware - one file per virtual disk. Each virtual disk has a setting where you can decide if the disk shall be split into several files or just one. The default is split, but I prefer it the other way.

Actually, the potential to split is in VBox, too, I think, but I never considered using it. What drives me crazy in VMware is all the little files in the caches folder subtree.

 

[Guest]

10 minutes ago, Bill Meyer said:

What drives me crazy in VMware is all the little files in the caches folder subtree.

Maybe you should stop looking the directory content of some cache folders and watch the birds and bees outside flying in the sun and having a good time.

[dummzeuch 1505]

5 hours ago, Bill Meyer said:

The limitations on RDP are very sad. I understand in Windows 7 that Ultimate was a requirement for multiple -- not spanned -- monitor operation. Not happy with it, but at least it was a clear policy position.

With Windows 10, I have searched and searched, and have yet to find any clear statement as to multiple monitor operations with RDP.

I can't say anything about Windows 10, but with Windows 8 Remote Desktop's dual monitor support is available with pro and works quite well. (It's probably multi monitor support, but I've got only two.)

[John Kouraklis 94]

2 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

That is the first setting I am changing for a new VM.

Do you think it makes a difference performance-wise?

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

1 hour ago, John Kouraklis said:

Do you think it makes a difference performance-wise?

Honestly, I don't know! I have all my virtual machines on a couple of SSDs and I don't see any performance drop compared to a host installation. It may have an impact for mechanical drives, but I never did some meaningful performance tests (which I expect to be difficult to do anyway).

[Rollo62 536]

9 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

Honestly, I don't know! I have all my virtual machines on a couple of SSDs and I don't see any performance drop compared to a host installation. It may have an impact for mechanical drives, but I never did some meaningful performance tests (which I expect to be difficult to do anyway).

Usually with such things (also with RadStudio) I prefer to keep "most" default settings, and hope that they will perform best.

Why else should they be "default" then ?
Only for some well known issues I will of coarse setup differently.

Tweaking the last bit out of such systems is a task that needs a lot of test and research, which I am not paid for

 

Another reason: The first thing a service operator during a support call will ask you the following:
Have you set up the default settings ?
I not, then go home and restart fresh  (I do same with my projects ).

Edited August 21, 2019 by Rollo62

[Guest]

13 hours ago, Uwe Raabe said:

That is the same in VMware - one file per virtual disk. Each virtual disk has a setting where you can decide if the disk shall be split into several files or just one. The default is split, but I prefer it the other way.

For backups it is better to use split files.

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

43 minutes ago, Schokohase said:

For backups it is better to use split files.

Can you elaborate that statement a bit? What does better mean in this context?

 

I never have had problems with backups of those files. It may take a while to copy them, but that is almost the same with multiple files.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Uwe Raabe said:

Can you elaborate that statement a bit? What does better mean in this context?

 

I never have had problems with backups of those files. It may take a while to copy them, but that is almost the same with multiple files.

With differential backups you only have to backup the changed files.

 

Well one disk file will change at any time you start the vm, but with split option set there will be some files that have not changed and therefore need no backup

[Guest]

I just migrated from VirtualBox to Hyper-V. The result is AMAZING!

For me, with my setup, Hyper-V works SO much better than VirtualBox.

I suspect my woes had to do with VirtualBox's handling of graphics mostly.

 

So the story is that this new Tokyo-GUI project with DX were reaching compile-test cycles at 30+45 seconds. Even longer. Lots of painting going on, lots of cpu power to the DWM and other stuff.

So i bought a "gaming rack" with an i9 and 64 MB ram (no graphics card, never used them). The first two days were good but then my VMs started to "degrade" and the cituation were looking a lot like the 4-core 16 MB old workhorse.

So i did the migration to Hyper-V, last time, some 4 years ago, that did not work well. This time though! Brilliant! It works!

 

Now i am a happy puppy again. IMHO if you do not need other hosts than Windoze 10 Pro then do not bother with VirtualBox.

[Darian Miller 361]

On 8/20/2019 at 2:10 PM, John Kouraklis said:

Do you think it makes a difference performance-wise?

 

I've been using VMWare for a number of years and haven't noticed a difference in runtime performance from split or monolithic virtual disks.   Split disks do have the benefit of much quicker defragmenting, which is a common task that I do to increase performance.  So I would say it indirectly increases performance.

[Bill Meyer 337]

12 hours ago, Dany Marmur said:

I just migrated from VirtualBox to Hyper-V. The result is AMAZING!

For me, with my setup, Hyper-V works SO much better than VirtualBox.

I suspect my woes had to do with VirtualBox's handling of graphics mostly.

Interesting. I've been very happy on VBox, and the changeover would be tedious, but the main thing holding me back would be that VBox apparently does not work well with Hyper-V enabled, so it is one road or the other.

In my work, graphics play no part, so I have not seen any reason to be unhappy on that score.

[Guest]

on mobile so not verbose:

it was the painting of the IDE, win10 berlin dx ribbon = sluggish esp if the dwm gets qirky.

[A.M. Hoornweg 144]

3 hours ago, Dany Marmur said:

on mobile so not verbose:

it was the painting of the IDE, win10 berlin dx ribbon = sluggish esp if the dwm gets qirky.

A lot can be accelerated by changing some Windows 10 settings inside the VM:

 

Control panel ->

System ->

Advanced system settings ->

Advanced ->

Performance settings ->

Adjust for best performance.

 

Then re-enable only the absolute minimum :  ("show window contents while dragging" +  "smooth edges of screen fonts")

 

 

 

 

[Cristian Peța 103]

I enabled out of curiosity the Hyper-V and shut myself in the foot because this enabled Credential Guard.

VMware doesn't run with Credential Guard enabled. I lost an hour to turn it off.

[Uwe Raabe 2057]

19 minutes ago, Cristian Peța said:

I enabled out of curiosity the Hyper-V and shut myself in the foot because this enabled Credential Guard.

VMware doesn't run with Credential Guard enabled. I lost an hour to turn it off.

Indeed, currently Hyper-V doesn't play well with any other hypervisor system. This is going to change in the near future at least for VMware Workstation, though.

[costa 0]

Hello,

 

I know, this thread is about using Delphi in a VM.

 

However, I currently use two apps that are written in Delphi, Toad Data Modeler (TDM) & The Journal RM (JRM) on a Windows 2016 VM - I don't know exactly the hardware running them, they are in a data center. I will come back with more details if I manage to get them.

 

I have two issues:

1. The dialogs in both TDM & JRM take a long time to show up and the higher the CPU usage, the longer it takes for these dialogs to show up.

2. Typing inside the JRM richtext editors is very slow. I type, I stop and I watch the letters appearing one by one in slo-mo. Needless to say, word doesn't exhibit this behaviour.

 

Only these two apps have this issue. I tried to open the Settings dialog of Notepad++ and it's almost instantaneous.

 

I also have a windows 10 VM running on a mac inside desktop parallels and the performance is very good for both apps.

 

Is there anything I can do to improve the performance - I should add - that is in my power? I don't have control over the hardware and the VM resources allocation.

 

I find it just very weird that two delphi apps have this issue. As is these apps are barely usable.

 

Thanks

 

OS Name    Microsoft Windows Server 2016 Standard

Version    10.0.14393 Build 14393

System Manufacturer    VMware, Inc.
System Model    VMware Virtual Platform

Processor    Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 0 @ 2.00GHz, 2000 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)

 

Edited October 28, 2020 by costa