SSD for VMware Partitions?

[Johnjdpower]

Good Afternoon Everyone,

 

I currently have two 840 pros in Raid 0, but I am wanting to break the RAID and only use one for my OS and Games. I am going to start using VMware Workstation with my Technet subscription to make a bunch of VMs. My question is whether I should break the RAID 0 and use one of the SSDs to store the VMs on or just sell the SSD and use my 2TB for the VMs? Multiple VMs will be running at the same time and I know that the 2TB read might bottleneck, but will the SSD also have the bottleneck issue? Or if anyone can look at my config below and let me know of another alternative with the HDDs I have.

 

CPU: 3770k
Mobo: DZ77GA-70k
Cooling: H100i
RAM: 4x 4GB Vengeance 1600Mhz

GPU:  GTX 660ti

 

HDDs:

2x 840 Pro 256GB (raid 0)

1x 2TB Barracuda ST2000DM001

1x 3TB Barracuda ST3000DM001

 

Thanks!

 

 

 

 

 

[IdeaStormer]

Option 3: Keep the SSD Raid 0 and store the VM's on the 2TB drive?

 

I'd suggest you store the VM's on the HDD, if you are really concerned about performance then you should buy a dedicated SATA controller and more drives all in RAID 0, (HDD's). If I were you I would first try it out as is and see what it gets you before changing anything, if it works then no problem, if it doesn't then you have some idea what you need to improve. The bottleneck all depends what you are going to do with the VM's in the long run, sure on installing them you will get some lag/slowness due to all the IO of getting things setup, but after a while the VM's won't be changing much unless your VM environment involves major data IO. I have three VM's running on a RAID 10 setup and usually its great, but when the VMs get into an update state at the same time I get some lag, but it does not happen often enough for me to change things. Then again if you are going to power on and off your computer all the time it maybe a factor as you'll be starting them up each time as well. I leave mine on all the time as I also log into them remotely to do things.

[Johnjdpower]

Option 3: Keep the SSD Raid 0 and store the VM's on the 2TB drive?

 

I'd suggest you store the VM's on the HDD, if you are really concerned about performance then you should buy a dedicated SATA controller and more drives all in RAID 0, (HDD's). If I were you I would first try it out as is and see what it gets you before changing anything, if it works then no problem, if it doesn't then you have some idea what you need to improve. The bottleneck all depends what you are going to do with the VM's in the long run, sure on installing them you will get some lag/slowness due to all the IO of getting things setup, but after a while the VM's won't be changing much unless your VM environment involves major data IO. I have three VM's running on a RAID 10 setup and usually its great, but when the VMs get into an update state at the same time I get some lag, but it does not happen often enough for me to change things. Then again if you are going to power on and off your computer all the time it maybe a factor as you'll be starting them up each time as well. I leave mine on all the time as I also log into them remotely to do things.

 

Thanks for the insight. I am in the process of moving my VMs from my old HDD (1TB Green) to the 2TB drive. I believe the performance issues I faced on the old HDD was due to it being a green drive, only 5400RPM.

[IdeaStormer]

Thanks for the insight. I am in the process of moving my VMs from my old HDD (1TB Green) to the 2TB drive. I believe the performance issues I faced on the old HDD was due to it being a green drive, only 5400RPM.

 

Yes, those 5400rpm drives are rather crap if you ask me, they may save a few pennies but give you millions of dollars worth of aggravation. After using one, I vowed to never do that again nor allow anyone within reach of my advice to buy one (even for laptops).

[ha1o2surfer]

If the only thing you are going to run on the HD are the VM's, then you might be ok.. If you do a lot of compacting/updates/changes to VM's, you could also just move them to the SSD temporarily then move them back. I run a lot of VM's at work and having an SSD in my laptop saves me loads to times building images and such. You could always get a cheap 512 or something instead of a hard drive. 

[mybeat]

It depends which type of VMs will you be running, their workload and how often will you be reinstalling them, without this info it's hard to recommend on using ssds or not. 

 

From personal experience a singe 7200 can barely handle 4 Windows VMs then you'll be bottlenecked by disk I/O.

 

Here's how disks are used in my VM server setup:

- os: ssd, for all OS partitions of linux vms which I care about. No windows here as it writes a lot for no reason. 

- data: where actual data is stored, which is used by vms installed on ssd.

- db: single 7200 disk just for database. 

- junk: really old 7200 disks for stuff which I reinstall often and windows.

[orangecat]

Why not keep the RAID 0 and put the VMs on the SSDs? I don't see why it would make a difference.

[Crion]

Unless, you're running on a massive RAID, you will see performance degradation in a VM,  This is a fact of life.  Also, the less the VMware drives are doing, the better your performance will likely be. 

[IdeaStormer]

Unless, you're running on a massive RAID, you will see performance degradation in a VM,  This is a fact of life.  Also, the less the VMware drives are doing, the better your performance will likely be. 

 

Well that would be true for any application that writes a lot but I've yet to correlate a drive death to VM's vs no VM's on it.

[Crion]

but I've yet to correlate a drive death to VM's vs no VM's on it.

 

I never said there was any relation.  All I said was that a VM will see degraded performance if it shares it's drive with something else.  I work with two 10 server dual Xeon VMWare clusters every day using massive RAID arrays on a NetApp mounted via NFS.  This is an extreme scenario but if the VM disk pool is shared with something else, performance tanks on all the VMs.   

[ha1o2surfer]

I never said there was any relation.  All I said was that a VM will see degraded performance if it shares it's drive with something else.  I work with two 10 server dual Xeon VMWare clusters every day using massive RAID arrays on a NetApp mounted via NFS.  This is an extreme scenario but if the VM disk pool is shared with something else, performance tanks on all the VMs.   

a single SSD will most likely be better than any HD Raid away for VM's. It takes a lot to bring an SSD to it's knees and running 4-5 VM's on an SSD at once with windows running as the host OS isn't that thing.