VMs on External Drive?

[Chiefcrowe]

If I want to run a few VMs on a USB 3.0 hard drive from a laptop, that shouldn't be a big bottleneck right? Never tried this but may be doing this for a dev/testing environment....

 

[ViRGE]

The bottleneck will be the hard drive. At 625MB/sec you've got bandwidth to spare (there's also a slight CPU hit from the interrupts, but it shouldn't be high enough to care).

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Thanks, sounds like this setup should work pretty well for setting up test websites and sharepoint stuff.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

I found running LM from a native 5400RPM SATA2 setup a lot SLOWER than when I ran it from a rather modern USB thumb drive on a USB3 port. Go figure.

I am now flirting with booting the live filesystem from USB3 and installing it to another SUB flash memory device also on a USB3 port.

 

[imagoon]

It will work but it will seem sluggish compared internal drives. I disagree with Virge though, the interrupt load on some of my test boxes was nearing 15% of an i5 running 2.8ghz so it was typically quite noticeable esp if you need to run more than one from USB like I was required to. (Stupidly designed work laptop for software support and dev.)

 

[Gunbuster]

At least go SSD over USB. I would not want to deal with a single spinning drive IOPS and USB overhead.

 

[Mir96TA]

I have my lab CUCM, Unity run off the USB 3.0 (Toshiba 320 Gig) which seems to be just fine.
off course its lab environment with phone load 12 in total hee eeee

 

[dave_the_nerd]

USB isn't the bottleneck, the spinner hard drive is. If you're running multiple VMs of of one HDD, it's going to be slow whether it's USB or not.

If you can work within the 120GB/240GB limit, then an SSD is affordable enough to be preferable, IMO. More than that, and it still depends on workload, number and types of VMs, datasets, etc.

 

[MrCassdin]

I have VMs which run on a local RAID1 set using 5,400 RPM "green" Seagate drives and these are by far my "slowest" VMs, even though they are using SATA3.

I also run VMs from USB3 flash drives which are quick but my fastest VMs run from an external 7,200 RPM 1TB WD hard drive connected via eSATA.