Arranging virtual hard disks on host machine's physical disks

Arranging virtual hard disks on host machine's physical disks

What's the best way to arrange a set of virtual hard disks on my host machine's physical disks?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    When you register, my team of editors will also send you the latest expert resources covering all areas of server virtualization, such as platforms, architectures and strategies, server hardware, managing virtual environments, application issues and more.

    Margie Semilof, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchServerVirtualization.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchServerVirtualization.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

The best way to arrange virtual hard disks is to mount them on separate physical drives, whenever possible, for the best possible parallelism. If you have a server with three drives which is hosting two virtual operating systems, you can place the host operating system on drive #1, and the virtual drives for each guest operating system on drives #2 and #3, respectively.

Sometimes you'll need to balance this against your available resources. If you have a system that has four drives and you're emulating four servers on that machine, you can place each of the virtual drives for the three most commonly-accessed servers on separate physical drives. The least-used machine can share the same hard drive as the host operating system. This cuts down on the amount of contention between the guest operating systems and the host operating systems.

If you have the money and the drive bay space, it doesn't hurt to always dedicate a drive to a given virtual server whenever possible—in other words, to link a virtual disk to a physical disk. Keep in mind that this is not for system disks, but for data disks; you can't run a virtual server's OS files from a linked disk.


Do you have comments on this Ask the Expert Q&A? Let us know.

This was first published in May 2006