Windows 10: VM - run on SSD or Spinner?

Hyper-V is more integrated on Windows, as long as you have Windows 10 Pro. It's not available on Windows 10 home. I'm not entirely sure I would agree that it outperforms VMWare workstation, at least in my experience. And VMWare by far has better support for Linux OS's than Hyper-V, so depending upon what you are doing, there could be advantages to VMWware Workstation Pro. However, VMWare Workstation Pro is not free, it's around $250.

What is the benefit of running 2 VMWare sessions? You can run as many VM's as your hardware will support simultaneously, you just cannot close the core VMWare application, but you can minimize it and not have to see it.

Interesting. I usually only access the host drive running from a guest, or I access a guest from another guest, so I've not had a need to access a guest's hard drive directly from the host.

Granted my experience is with enterprise IT, but I'm not a fan of Hyper-V. I find they are still playing catchup in many areas to VMWare. They might beat them on cost, but management of VM's with Hyper-V is a pain in the arse.

 

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Hmmmm, I find it strange that you were seeing bad performance running 2 or more VM's under VMWare. I regularly run a 4 node LAB on my Core i5 and a Core i7 desktop at work, each with 16GB of RAM and I don't experience poor performance. I wonder if you might have configured multiple CPU's when you didn't need them, or didn't have the VMware tools installed. Both of those could result in poor performance.

Yeah, I haven't connected to external physical drives. So, I wouldn't have stumbled upon that limitation

The free vmware product is the vmware workstation player. And yes, it doesn't have a huge number of features. I sprung for the license as I use virtual labs all of the time and I run more Linux than I usually do Windows.

 

Hi there

HYPER-V is good for Windows VM's but I'm not sure if anybody has got a Linux VM to run on it yet --- also getting peripherals like external USB HDD's to easily work with the VM is somewhat tricky - and for sound and video you'll have to use something like RDP if you need those features on your VM.

That said there's no need to create a new VM from scratch - HYPER-V will read / use VMWARE type of Virtual disk .

Why not save your existing VM(s) - simply save the VM file -- all the files in the folder, and then test out HYPER-V with your existing VM --if you don't like it or hose it up -- nothing wrong - just delete from Disk. Remember though VMWARE (and VBOX) can't concurrently run with HYPER-V so you'll have to boot with one or the other. You CAN though run VBOX and VMWARE concurrently though.

If you use Linux as VM's then IMO use VMware. For Linux DATA (have the OS on an SSD) pass RAW HDD's as ext4 format to the VM i.e as physical HDD's and then use mdadm as Linux RAID - if you use RAID 0 this will considerably speed up I/O from Spinner physical data disks. OK RAID 0 doesn't give you protection - but if you've got backup then who cares - and it really speeds up the I/O even on slow spinners

mdadm is probably installed by default. Decent HDD's are reliable anyway so you shouldn't run into problems here - especially if you take backups regularly of your data.

Once you've created your array say /dev/sda and dev/sdb you'll get a single device /mdx where x is any number. Now simply mount that to any mount point and you are in business !! Google for mdadm as there's a lot of options - but it sure works on any Linux distro I've tried.

With Linux once the system is loaded from the SSD you shouldn't have too much I/O on the SSD so IMO it's a mute point whether to run the VM from spinners or not. As Linux OS is quite small I'd keep it on the SSD and don't put too much in / and /home directories - keep data on separate HDD('s).

With Windows - VM's - different consideration -- my own view would be to put a SMALL OS on the SSD and again pass the spinners as physical data drives and then use Windows storage spaces --again this will speed up considerably the I/O on the Guest OS.

Like all these things - depends on size and speed of HDD's, amount of RAM and CPU -- CPU is usually the least problematic resource in running VM's - unless you are really doing a lot of stuff on them like video editing etc.

Cheers
jimbo

 

Thanks for your response.

Using my VMs solely with Windows-7 and Windows-10 Guests, no Linux.

 

Perhaps you missed my earlier post - I have 1TB SSD and 750GB HDD

Some additional information based on the posts that I've seen so far.
32Gb RAM
i7-6700HQ
Have license for VMWare Workstation, Win-10 Pro and VMs are a mix of Win-7Pro and Win-10Pro, Expect to run 2-3 VMs simultaneously, All windows OS Guest under Win-10Pro Host.
So no hardware issues as far as running multiple VMs simultaneously...

 

Thanks for your reply.

Am not sure what you meant by "two vmware sessions in parallel is pretty much a no no". On my Win-7 box, quad core CPUs and ample RAM, I've been running multiple VMWare VMs simultaneously with no issues.

I've used Shared folders to share data from VM to host and did not quite get "With vmware, when it is accessing a hard drive, the hard drive is not available to the host". Are you taking about the internal hard drive where the VMs reside/Host or external drive?

Thanks again.

 

Thanks for your reply.

Could you please elaborate on why you think "management of VM's with Hyper-V is a pain "?

Thanks again.

 

When one connects an external USB device to a VM, one only needs to disconnect from VM and then the device is re-connected to host. I've done this with external HDDs/Flash Drives etc. I didn't have to close down the VM for this.

Could you perhaps be talking about something else?

Thanks,

 

my experience has been similar to yours.

 

Thanks for your reply.
So, install VMWare Workstation on SSD, put VHD files on HDD? Or did I miss something?
Thanks again

 

Sure, my complaints are more related to the enterprise segment, as I use these products for a living professionally.

#1). Hyper-V is a Windows box, and thus needs frequent Windows patching and regular reboots. That's never ideal for a hypervisor
#2). With VMWare, you can install a simple client and connect from any machine with a username/password and it just works. On the other hand, under Hyper-V, remote connections and management can be difficult from a machine that is NOT on the domain.
#3). Built in monitoring is lackluster, without the use of 3rd party tools.
#4). only officially supports about 15 OS's, which are almost all just Windows.
#5). VMware offers fault tolerant VM's with up to 4 vCPU's, compared to no FT at all with Hyper-V
#5). VMWare offers hot-add hardware, Hyper-V does not
#6). High availability in VMware is a checkbox, and is reasonably complex to setup in Hyper-V.

Those are just a few things. For home users, not really major concerns. But since I use VMware at work, I use it at home too.
Thanks again.[/QUOTE]

 

What I did was to install an SSD specifically for the running of VMs. I installed a 240 g SanDisk Ultra II 550 read and 500write, and this really makes a different when running VMs. . .*Party

 

Put the VMs on the SSD if you have space. It will be much faster and you don't really need to worry about wearing out SSD. This was a worry 10 years ago.

There were a couple of comments about defining the actual disk as SSD to the guest. Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor so it isn't relevant but both VBox and VMware pass through disk access direct. You can (in both cases) indicate to the guest that it is SSD but it is pretty much pointless unless you are trying to test something in a VM that relies on an emulated SSD.

If you are short of space you can simply move the virtual disk back and forward to the fastest place when you want to use it.

I find that running compact /compactos:always in the guest makes my VM run quicker irrespective of hypervisor or storage medium.

If you don't change it much (or after an upgrade when you have deleted stuff) it is worth running in the guest Code: defrag C: /h /x defrag C: /h /o sdelete C: /z[/quote] And then compact it.

I can say for sure that in my case USB2 is the slowest, next slowest is SD card, then internal 7200, then SSD.

 

Hi there.

This is a bit like flogging a DEAD HORSE.

If you have something like Windows as a VM then it makes huge sense to have the OS on an SSD.

With Linux VM's it really doesn't matter (apart from initial time of loading the OS which usually is pretty fast anyway).

Most Linux systems unless you go mega bonkers and install about everything on the planet are small optimised OS'es and probably run quite nicely within your RAM space -- VM's tend to EAT RAM for breakfast so that's often a bit of a bottleneck.

Latest VMWARE workstation though manages Dynamic RAM so if you have VMware workstation the amount of RAM allocated to your VM isn't fixed as it used to be.

Managing DATA whether on HOST or VM is another thing entirely --data drives probably would be better on SSD's - especially if doing things like PHOTOHOP / video editing etc - but for multimedia and basic file serving decent spinners are OK.

Certainly if you are using a VM as a Network File server or as a multi media server you don't need the mega fastest I/O --your network is probably the bottleneck. I've found though for this type of data add them as RAW / Phystcal Disks so you can use the Native file systems on the GUEST OS.

Also if using Linux GUESTS use the SOFTWARE RAID (mdadm) which is in pretty well all Linux distros these days - and to READ / WRITE Windows NTFS files install package ntfs-3g.

For easy sharing also install SAMBA.

For Windows GUESTS also add RAW / Physical HDD's and use Storage spaces (sort of Windows software RAID).

For serious use of VM's really forget about Virtual Disks - that gives an extra lot of I/O overhead between HOST and VM. For simple testing scenarios - fine but if you are actually using VM's for serious work then use NATIVE / PHYSICAL / RAW HDD's - they can be offline to a Windows Host - no probs there.

Cheers
jimbo