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Is it possible to limit how much CPU a virtual machine can use with VMWare Player?

I use VMWare to run a Windows XP virtual machine. I want to keep it on in the background all the time.

The real computer runs Windows 7 and is sometimes a little bit short of memory. That's why I want to check if I can throttle the VM down to the bare minimum to keep it running in the background constantly without interfering too much.

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2 Answers

of course....it is possible. reducing the vmware cpu usage may damage your logical machine performance.

take a look to this article: http://tech-nets.blogspot.com/2012/12/limit-your-application-cpu-usage.html

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If you have multiple cores in the machine (Say 4 core machine), then you can assign 1 core to the VM and that will limit the CPU usage.

But if you do not then as the previous answer pointed out, you will have to limit VMWare itself to CPU usage which is not recommended to do.

Note that this does not limit portions on a single core. Rather, this limits the VM to one core instead.

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