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Would SSD Raid improve performance in VMWare?

D

davidst99

Senior member
Hi, I use multiple VMs in VMWare and each have 60GB+ virtual disks. Would SSD Raid 1 configuration improve performance in the VMs? I thought it might because it's working with a large files (disk images) but I could be way off. Thanks for any info!

David
 
Last edited:
I don't think so. On the outside (host) you're seeing large disk images, but they are randomly accessed/written on in small blocks by the VM. Performance is limited mainly by the random read/write capabilities of the SSD and Host CPU speed as there are overheads and inefficiencies in the process.

I made a performance comparison test some time ago with my SanDisk Extreme II SSD with a Windows 8.1 VM:

972cmio.png


You can imagine which one is the VM, which one the Host.
 
Just for the record, RAID1 wouldn't give a performance improvement regardless. RAID1 is for disk redundancy. The second disk is a live copy of the first disk so if the first disk were to fail, the second disk could keep you up and running until the first disk is replaced.

I think you meant RAID0, which is striping. Simply put, files are split across both disks so you combine the speeds of both disks when accessing files. However random read and writes benefit very little, if at all from RAID0 so as pointed out above this won't achieve much either. Where RAID0 really shines is sequential reads and writes.
 
SSBrain said:
I don't think so. On the outside (host) you're seeing large disk images, but they are randomly accessed/written on in small blocks by the VM. Performance is limited mainly by the random read/write capabilities of the SSD and Host CPU speed as there are overheads and inefficiencies in the process.

I made a performance comparison test some time ago with my SanDisk Extreme II SSD with a Windows 8.1 VM:

972cmio.png


You can imagine which one is the VM, which one the Host.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the screenshots. I was just thinking since the virtual drive is a really large file so a SSD Raid 0 will be better able to handle it but I guess not. Thanks again.

David
 
Coup27 said:
Just for the record, RAID1 wouldn't give a performance improvement regardless. RAID1 is for disk redundancy. The second disk is a live copy of the first disk so if the first disk were to fail, the second disk could keep you up and running until the first disk is replaced.

I think you meant RAID0, which is striping. Simply put, files are split across both disks so you combine the speeds of both disks when accessing files. However random read and writes benefit very little, if at all from RAID0 so as pointed out above this won't achieve much either. Where RAID0 really shines is sequential reads and writes.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. Yes I meant RAID 0. I guess there's no reason to have a SSD Raid 0 for anything 🙂

David
 
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