Enabling Dual-CPU Support in Windows 2000 under VmWare
After my triumph converting a VmWare virtual machine for use with VirtualBox, I thought I'd attempt another job that I've been meaning to give a go for some time - enabling Dual CPU support in a Windows 2000 VM that I use, so that the guest can take advantage of both cores in my dual-core CPU. Windows 2000 selects a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) at install-time, which either supports or does not support multiple processors. To enable SMP support after this time, you have to do a repair installation which enables a new HAL to be detected. (Some background info can be found here).
To do this, you'll need:
- Your original Windows 2000 boot CD or ISO image
- A Windows 2000 CD Key
And the steps are as follows:
- Make sure the VM is shut down cleanly (ie not suspended).
- First thing was to copy the VM image (or take a snapshot), in case you break it.
- Edit the Virtual Machine configuration to set 2 processors. You can do this by double-clicking on processors in the VmWare Workstation 6.0 GUI, or you can edit the "numvcpus" value in the Virtual Machine definition (.vmx file) manually using a text editor. This change in our 'virtual hardware' should now be detected during the repair installation, resulting in a different HAL being installed.
- Boot the VM off the Windows 2000 install CD. As soon as you see the prompt 'Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver.', pressed F7. (Yes, that's right, F7, not F6). Note - there is no visual feedback to show that you've pressed F7 - you just have to cross your fingers that it worked!When prompted to select between install or repair, select install (ENTER).
- Hit F8 to agree to license.
- Select your windows install and select 'R' for repair.
- Windows will copy some files, then reboot. Now let your VM boot from the hard-drive (Not the CD-ROM) and an 'Upgrade' install will commence - including completely new hardware detection.
- As part of this install, you will need to re-enter your product key!
- When the install completes, your VM will reboot. Allow it to boot from the hard-drive again.
- After logging in, if you look at Task Manager you should be able to see 2 graphs - one for each CPU. (You might need to select View -> CPU History -> One Graph Per CPU in order for this to work)
Note that enabling dual-cpu support may not give you the performance boost you are expecting! Stay tuned for another post soon where I do some performance comparisons on this!
Note2 - The above process seems to wipe out your HOSTS file - if you have made any changes to this, you'll need to re-add them. Any applications you had installed *should* still work, but ofcourse there are no guarantees - this could vary between different applications.
Comments
No Comments for this post yet...
Leave a comment
Allowed XHTML tags: <p, ul, ol, li, dl, dt, dd, address, blockquote, ins, del, span, bdo, br, em, strong, dfn, code, samp, kdb, var, cite, abbr, acronym, q, sub, sup, tt, i, b, big, small>