In <200906010717.06296.rschulz@sonic.net>, Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Monday June 1 2009, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
On 2009-05-31 10:56:42 +0800 Randall R Schulz
wrote:
On Saturday May 30 2009, Zhang Weiwu wrote:
could virtual machine software make use of a separate harddisk? VMware supports it.
QEmu/KVM does too. I'm pretty sure you can convince Xen to use a file or any block device as well. However, this may or may not actually increase your performance, depending on the virtualization software. If they use the same techniques as the kernel uses for swap files, the performance increase is tremendously minimal.
What is the name / terminology used for this? If you give me the right keyword I should be able to google out everything.
As far as I know, there's not special name for it, nor is there anything you're likely to find on Web. When you define a virtual machine you have the option of having the virtualized disks be backed by files (considered the default) or by actual disks or disk partitions.
any "block device" -- these are devices that support read, write, and seek operations like "normal" files. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/