Last week I hit a wall of frustration trying to run several VMs and always being at or near 100% memory and the swapping that resulted.  Usually just one VM and the typical applications I ran in OS X were enough to bring everything to it’s knees.  Well, I decided enough was enough and placed an order for an 8GB kit from Newegg.com.  This is the result:

Just testing it out, I launched 2 XP VMs and a Windows  7 VM, along with every app I typically use.  I didn’t hit 100%, but I did make it over the 6GB barrier:

Before doing this, I was really torn between a SSD drive and this upgrade.  However, this appears to have solved all my woes.  I’m sure SSD would be even better, but this is amazing as is.

Would I recommend this upgrade?  If you use VMware Fusion heavily on your Mac, and especially if you do demos in VMs with your Mac, I would say with no reservations.

I’m tired of trying to do a million things with DD-WRT, and feel that 100Mbps on the WAN link may not be fast enough soon with DOCSIS 3.0.  So I’ve come up with two options:

1. Create a small router/firewall with an embedded board, like a Soekris kit and end up with something like this:
   
2. Create a beastly VMware server using more commodity hardware and virtualize my router (my switch supports VLAN tagging).

What would you do?

I think a virtual machine I have has the policy set to clear the page file on shutdown.  That seems pretty pointless in a VM to me.  Any reason to not change it?

After waiting about 45 minutes on hold, VMware confirmed that they’re having issues with the Academic store and it should be fixed in about 24 hours.  At this point, I have no choice but to uninstall Fusion 3 and reinstall Fusion 2. *sigh*

Good thing the guy answered right when he did, because I had literally entered my credit card number in the regular store and was about to hit check out.

It seems that VMware’s Academic store won’t recognize that I’ve registered VMware Fusion 2.x and won’t allow me to proceed through checkout.  I’m on hold waiting for their support to try to get it straightened out, but in the mean time I have a VMware installation that I can’t start up.

In addition, I thought I would just request an eval key for Fusion 3 to get me through until I had a proper key, but that system seems broken too!

I guess I probably should have waited for a serial before installing Fusion 3?