My setup is nothing too special, at least not in my own eyes, but probably not your average home setup either. Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
I have 3 volumes, C:\, D:\ and E:\ and 3 monitors.
C:\ is where my host OS (Win7 x64) is installed, and it contains 4 VMs. RAID1 10k rpm drives.
o A master XP VM. Lots (2 dozen) different snapshots. Used for linked clones on E:\
o A master Win7 x86 VM. 10 snapshots. Used for linked clones on E:\
o A master Win7 x64 VM. 19 snapshots. Used for linked clones on E:\
o A full VM (about 42GB in size), Windows 7 x86. I run this VM virtually full time on one screen.
E:\ is where most of my VMs reside. I currently have 36 of them on this volume. RAID1 WD RE drives. Mostly linked clones linked to the master VMs on C:\. One VM is currently about 240GB in size and is also run quite a bit of the time on its own screen. Then I also periodically run other VMs either as additional tabs in on of the existing two Workstation instances or I run a 3rd instance on my third monitor. I don't run that one full screen though so I can have a couple of other apps visible too.
D:\ doesn't house any VMs anymore, but contains a lot of my shared data that the VMs access. Again RAID1, but these are only Seagate Barracudas. Note that I do not use Workstation shared folders, but do all my file sharing between VMs and the host through standard network sharing. All VMs used bridge networking and look/act as real machines on my network.
My host box is an ASUSP9X79 mobo, 32GB RAM, Intel Core i7-3930K, ATI HD6850 video.
All my volumes are AES encrypted using TrueCrypt.
I run Avast anti-virus on the host and all VMs, but have it configured to avoid realtime scanning of virtual machines and network drives.
I have only hit this issue twice and both time it seemed to be with a 3rd Workstation instance running the same XP clone VM. The first time it happened I did find the exception in the virtual machine log file (didn't really seem to provide much more info than the error message itself, but then I don't really know what I am looking at). This time around I couldn't find anything in the virtual machine log, and have been unable to find a log for the workstation process.
Anyway, I just literally updated to 9.0.2, so will see if the issue persists there. Also, as I mentioned even though the error is fatal for workstation, it doesn't interrupt the vm processes so all up it is fairly benign in that sense.
Cheers.
