Zhang Weiwu wrote:
When talking about using a block device for hard disk image for virtual machine, Boyd said:
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. do people know a virtual machine software that can improve performance by making use of a separate harddisk instead of a disk image?
Yes, VMWare definitely needs physical disks when you desire any kind of performant disk I/O. We had some severe performance problems when we virtualized our fileserver. This could only be solved when we used physical drives for the shares. The same went for our domino servers. Though I recommend NOT to use a physical drive for the boot or system partition. Instead use a normal VM for the OS installation and then add your physical drive as a second raw device. Be careful that no other OS will ever access that drive, otherwise you might get messages like "id has changed, cannot mount drive...". -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org