Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1464 mails)

[Sandy Drobic <opensuse@xxxxxxxxx>]

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@xxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@xxxxxxxxxxxx