Virtual Machine on RAMdisk

[tjcinnamon]

I have been playing around with RAMdisk and I am blown away by its performance. I have been bitten the the SSD benchmarking bug.

I was wondering:

Do you think if I installed virtual machine software as well as the Virtual OS image on the RAMdisk so you think it will have incredible performance (better than intel SSD)?

The reason I ask is because I don't have any virtualization software yet and I am not sure if I want to (or can afford) make the investment.

Thanks,
JOe K.

 

[masteryoda34]

Originally posted by: tjcinnamon
The reason I ask is because I don't have any virtualization software yet and I am not sure if I want to (or can afford) make the investment.

There are many free virtual machine programs. Sun VirtualBox and Microsoft Virtual PC are two free ones. (Virtual Box is better IMO.) I believe VMWare also has some free software available.

 

[Nothinman]

Do you think if I installed virtual machine software as well as the Virtual OS image on the RAMdisk so you think it will have incredible performance (better than intel SSD)?

The VM software itself would be pointless since it's small. Putting a VM on a ramdisk would make it perform really well but unless you've got like 32G of memory you won't have much space for software in that VM.

 

[RebateMonger]

Speed isn't usually a big issue with virtual machines, unless it's in a production setting with busy databases or lots of I/O. You aren't going to be playing any modern games or watching Hi-Def movies under a virtualized OS, since they don't support video acceleration or 3D acceleration.

 

[bigi]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
Speed isn't usually a big issue with virtual machines, unless it's in a production setting with busy databases or lots of I/O. You aren't going to be playing any modern games or watching Hi-Def movies under a virtualized OS, since they don't support video acceleration or 3D acceleration.

Not true. Virtual Box supports 3D accel. since v2.1 or so.
HDD speed plays huge role when running VM machines especially when saving state, snapshots, etc.

 

[Nothinman]

Speed isn't usually a big issue with virtual machines, unless it's in a production setting with busy databases or lots of I/O. You aren't going to be playing any modern games or watching Hi-Def movies under a virtualized OS, since they don't support video acceleration or 3D acceleration.

I/O speeds are pretty much the main thing that matters when it comes to VMs.

 

[DivideBYZero]

I get pretty decent performance running VMware images of enterprise system management SW (BMC) on a USB 2.0 attached 2.5" 5400rpm external disk. :shrug: