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Running VM's off a USB drive

T

techtips

Gawd
Joined
Jan 3, 2011
Messages
530
Hello everybody, I've been thinking of putting in a SSD drive into my Dell M1530 laptop. Currently I have the 500gb Segate momentus XT drive and it has been great. Obviously with this being a hybrid drive, you still do not get the full performance of a true solid state drive.
I've been thinking of taking out my main drive and putting in a 80-120gig SSD which will store main applications and my VM's I would have them configured on a external hard drive which connects via USB to my laptop.

My question about this configuration is...would there be benefits of running VM's off an external disk? would USB hinder performance compared to the VM's being stored on the main drive?
Also, if I am running 5-8 VM's on this usb connected hard drive, would more VM's = some kind of operating lag(aside from memory being allocated to each vm)?

Any suggestions/comments/ideas?

Thank you!
 
Well the fastest I've seen my late-model USB 2.0 drives go is around 30MB/s for transfers... I would hate to see the performance of running 5-8 VMs on that kind of bandwidth - imagine trying to use a hard drive which has that sort of performance as the operating system drive for 5-8 systems simultaneously. Not going to be pretty.

Which virtualization solution are you using which lets you have USB datastores?
 
actually, it's not too bad, as long as you're not expecting lightning fast performance, and you're only running a few vms.
 
Portability (between multiple systems running VMware Workstation) is the only benefit I can see.

If you can't connect via e/SATA or maybe USB 3.0, it will get old waiting for disk/bandwidth contention to subside.

I'd suggest the biggest SSD you can afford to install in your laptop and keeping the virtual drive sizes to the minimum needed.
 
What about an express card USB 3.0 or eSATA solution? I'm still limping along a Vostro 1500 (similar age to the XPS 1510) and have been thinking of dropping a USB3.0 or eSATA expresscard into it just to make file transfers smoother to the external storage I'm using. I don't see why it wouldn't help with VM disk bandwidth as well. Just a thought from a VM near noob.
 
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