Storage setup for VM throughput

[koshling]

I use my main machine for both work and play. For play its basically MMOs (well, an MMO) and there isn't really any issue. For work I make heavy use of VMs (VMWare workstation 6) and I have noticed that (especially when running 2+ VMs concurrently) I seem to be fairly heavily disk limitted (memory usage is substantial too, but not critical - sure am glad I went 8G though!).

My current setup is:

Q9450 O/C'd to about 3GHz
8G RAM
SpinPoint F1
Vista64 Ultimate
etc (not relevant to VM usage I think)

I'm fairly happy with things but for my next build I'd like to try to alleviate the bottleneck bit. I'm planning on going the SSD route for the OS, but I don't think it's going to be realistic to run my VMs from SSD (too large a set), so I'm looking for advice on best HDD configuration to run the VMs off (you can assume next build will be Windows 7). Right now I suspect an I/O operation queuing issue - so I'd also be interested in any advice on tweaking settings that might help in my current setup (but frankly that's secondary).

 

[aceO07]

Moving the VMs off to another drive may help a little.

 

[yinan]

VMs can be heavily dependant on drive IO what my be a good solution that should help alot is to add another drive or 2 to the system and set them up in a RAID0 array so that the virtual machines can have as many spindles to work against as they need. Hope this helps.