Windows 7: VMWare Player on SSD : faster than on HDD?

Hi,

I've been spending a huge amount of time in my Linux virtual space on a Samsung RAID0 HDD. I was wondering what type of real-world performance increase I would see if I moved this to my OCZ Vertex 2 SSD.



Has anyone ever compared a virtual machine on an HDD, to one on a SSD? is there any noticeable benefit that makes it worth considering?

Regards,
Golden

Heya Golden.

I have no idea.

BUT, keep in mind that it really matters what SSD you are refering to. You mentioned a OCZ Vertex 2. But what kind of real-world performance gain would come from a OCZ Vertex 3 SSD on a Sata III Motherboard in relation to virtual machines? Perhaps it matters.

I had no trouble using virtual XP mode on my computer running OCZ V.-3. Everything went pretty quick after the set up and increasing the RAM allotment. But I removed it since then

Hi there
usually the BIGGEST factor in Virtual Machine performance is the amount of RAM available both to IT and the HOST machine.

The amount of RAM you allocate to a VM is a difficult (non trivial) value to decide -- it's not a simple 1 : 1 relationship to the amount of RAM the equivalent VM would require if it were a REAL machine.

However you MUST have sufficient on the HOST machine.

In general if you have 4 GB or more on the HOST and you don't run too many applications on the VM this should be sufficient.

An SSD will always improve performance but if your HDD is decent then you won't gain as much as you thought by moving the vhd to an SSD.

Remember in any case the HOST machine has to initiate the I/O request in any case.

For VM's the best solution is to increase the RAM on the real machine and use the SSD for the HOST's OS.

In general unless you are using a VM for really extreme applications CPU won't generally be a problem -- I've had a W2K3 SERVER VM running on a tiny netbook -- although I did update the RAM to 4 GB and have an SSD for the Windows 7 Host.

Cheers
jimbo

Thats great info, and well explained, thanks Jimbo.

My host is Windows 7 Ultimate with 8 processors and 16GB RAM on an SSD. The virtual PC is assigned 4 processors and 6GB RAM, leaving 4 processors and 10GB for the Windows host, so it sounds like my setup is fine as it is.

I'm really still learning the rudimentaries of Linux, so the only workout it really gets at the moment is browsing the internet.

Regards,
Golden