Virtualization and SSD's

[geoffry]

Hi all,

Has anyone with an SSD used either VMware or virtualbox?

Given that most guest OS's are I/O limited performance wise from what I have read (unless you are doing something very CPU intensive I suppose) wouldn't having a good SSD like an Intel or Vertex make the guest OS run at near native speed if the rest of the hardware is good (Q9400 or better, 8GB ram or more)?

On my iMac I used Parallels (haven't used it in over a year, I just use boot camp now as fast switching isn't important at all for what the machine is used for now) and CPU / memory performance was good, I remember slowish program loading times though.

Any insight is appreciated, I'm thinking of doing something profound (for me anyways) for my next upgrade.

 

[lopri]

I'm curious about it as well. My question is not limited to SSD, though, in that I'd like to know what's the best way to keep optimal performance of VHDs. Say if you have multiple OSes running off a single physical disk and usually the VHDs are dynamically sized.. I wonder if it's better to partition a disk and put VHDs seperately? Or these practices are not necessary for SSDs?

 

[Nothinman]

Partitioning and separating the VM's disks will just add more seeks as you'll be jumping between partitions. The best you can do is statically allocate the disk files and maybe defragment them although that probably won't help much since the filesystem inside them won't really be contiguous either.

 

[aceO07]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
Partitioning and separating the VM's disks will just add more seeks as you'll be jumping between partitions. The best you can do is statically allocate the disk files and maybe defragment them although that probably won't help much since the filesystem inside them won't really be contiguous either.

How about having VM OS disk on HHD and mysql application and database on SSD? Would that increase the database operations?

 

[Nothinman]

How about having VM OS disk on HHD and mysql application and database on SSD? Would that increase the database operations?

Probably, but unless you're really restricted on space in the SSD I don't see why you'd go that route. I'd probably just do the full install on the SSD. A small Linux install is only a few gigs.

 

[lopri]

How about using one SSD per one VHD? Would it make sense performance-wise? (cost notwithstanding)