Windows 10: Improve Windows I/O in a VM - from Windows OR Linux Hosts

Hi there

I/O performance is often a problem with Virtual Machines - especially if you are using programs like Vmware with "Virtual" Formatted HDD's such as vdmk - especially with "Bog standard" Spinners..

A better solution by far is if you have the space and 2 HDD's (minimum) available is to pass these through as RAW physical HDD's and then use the NATIVE I/O subsystem of your Guest VM.

For example pass through 2 HDD's from Linux or Windows Hosts to a Windows Guest -- you might be running a Guest VM as a server -- no reason why servers shouldn't be VM's (that way people can access the VM / shared files without touching or even having an account on the HOST at all). Now create Windows Storage spaces from the HDD - this is a very efficient I/O system for Windows and you can set it up as a "Software RAID" type of system. The HDD's don't even have to be of the same size for Windows storage spaces.

If using a Linux Guest from a Windows Host then simply format the 2 HDD's as Ext4 and use the software RAID system in Linux - mdadm.

For Linux Host with Linux VM probably the best way is to simply SHARE the HDD's via Samba and just run the (Virtual) OS from an SSD.

For Windows run the Virtual OS from an SSD - it's the DATA drives I'm concerned with such as file shares for multi-media etc.

Cheers
jimbo

:)

 

External Hard Drive not in File Explorer

Plug in the drive and then boot the VM, although there's a possibility that the VM layer is causing issues so look at the host hardware that is accessible to the VM.

Alternately do as I recommended above i.e. "boot from a Linux Live USB/DVD with the drive already attached to your PC and powered on". That way you're booting directly into Linux and your drive may be accessible. No guarantees though.

 

Replacing Windows 10 on host with Windows 10 in VM

I have a laptop I bought with Windows 8.1 on it, which I upgraded to Windows 10. Now for some reasons I need to replace the host with Linux but I would like to keep my Win10 also to run VS2015. Since I have a valid license for the Win10, can I transfer
it to a virtual machine? I would keep a Linux host and a Win10 guest on the same machine. If this is possible, which VM software can handle this? I prefer VirtualBox but am open to using others.

 

On a related note, I found writing from a windows VM to a windows host external drive using hyper-v can be really slow eg 1-2 MB/s.

However if you go to network sharing centre and setup permissions for network sharing as you would to share any folders/files over network, then if you go to host and click on network in file explorer, you will see the shared folders in VM.

Then you can copy files from network VM drives to external host drives at a much faster rate (at least 10 times faster or more).

 

Ho there

even that is only around 20Mb/s --- on even bog standard HDD's with a bit of software RAID you could get up to around 200 Mb/s or more !!!.

Cheers
jimbo