On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 5:44 AM, Basil Chupin <blchupin@iinet.net.au> wrote:
I think that what you are really talking here is about installing VB with the DYNAMIC option for space allocation. Doing this has the price of less than perfect performance as there is an overhead in trying to ensure that the disc space keeps growing to accommodate additional data - until at least when the VMs are stabilised.
I want to avoid this by simply assigning enough disc space to cover all my current and potential needs. And doing so I also have a clear idea of how much space I would need on an external HDD to do backups of the VMs.
Am I wrong in my thinking?
I don't know if you are wrong.
All I can say is that I've always used Dynamic allocation....but what I do with my VMs isn't I/O intensive. So, I've not noticed any performance issues.
Ah, OK. I was only stating this from what is pointed out in the Manual for VB.
So, maybe using the Dynamic allocation may be the way to go. May solve thinking about how much space to allocate to VB at the beginning :-) .
Umm, I think you misunderstand what dynamic means here. Dynamic does *not* mean an unlimited size drive that grows as you use it. There are two ways to define a virtual drive: - One is to define the drive size and have the entire drive size allocated immediately.... so say you define a drive as 30 GB, then a 30 GB file is created, and the file on your drive is 30 GB in size even if it contains only 5 GB of data. - The other is to define a dynamic drive size. This sets a *maximum* drive size, but the file containing the virtual drive is only as big as the data it contains.... so say you define a dynamic drive as 30 GB but only install 5 GB of data, then the file is only 5 GB.... BUT... once you install or use up the 30 GB of space in that virtual drive, that's it for that drive, it cannot grow any bigger than the 30 GB you defined. (there are ways to expand the size of a drive, but they have nothing to do with defining a Dynamic drive). In the end, regardless of using Dynamic or not, you still need to decide on how much drive space to assign to each VM you define. C. -- openSUSE 12.1 x86_64, KDE 4.8.2 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org