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Store virtual machines in a drive pool


charlieny100

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I am running Server 2012 R2 with vmware workstation and have a drive pool. I've always assumed it best to store my virtual machines outside the drive pool. But reading the latest blog on 2.1 a lot of time was spent discussing the benefits to virtual machines and speed. So my question is, do virtual machines run well in a drive pool? If so, do people duplicate them?

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I've always stored my VM's outside of the pool.  I don't think duplicating the VM's will work properly and never liked the idea of doing that on running VM's.  You could always store them on the same drives just outside of the pool.  I didn't do this though as I didn't want the VM's to affect the speed in any way.

 

However, I recently purchased some SSD's and just added those to my server and put the VMs on them directly and totally separate from the pool.  The speed increase I get from those is well worth the extra money.

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Alex, the developer actually runs his VMs from the Pool. So that should speak volumes. ......

.....

Pun totally wasn't intended, but too good to even consider changing. :P

 

And any critical data should always be duplicated. If you are okay with losing it if a disk fails, then you don't need to duplicate it. But if you couldn't stand losing it....

 

As for performance, that really depends on use case. If this in an environment where performance is paramount, and every bit of speed is needed.... then you may want to consider a RAID10 for the VMs. Otherwise, .... well it depends on disks that the files reside on. And since you can use the "File Placement Rules" to control that.... you could add a SSD or two to the pool, and use the rules to ensure that's where the VMs are stored. Great for performance. And it isn't an accident that this is what Alex used for the example in the blog.

 

 

 

I've always stored my VM's outside of the pool.  I don't think duplicating the VM's will work properly and never liked the idea of doing that on running VM's.  You could always store them on the same drives just outside of the pool.  I didn't do this though as I didn't want the VM's to affect the speed in any way.

 

However, I recently purchased some SSD's and just added those to my server and put the VMs on them directly and totally separate from the pool.  The speed increase I get from those is well worth the extra money.

There is no issue with duplicating the VMs. If Real-Time Duplication is enabled (which it is by default), any write or modify commands are sent to both copies of the files at the same time, and the contents stay in sync.  

And again, by using the file placement rules, it allows you to maintain one pool, without sacrificing the speed that you want. But that is entirely up to you.

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Alex, the developer actually runs his VMs from the Pool. So that should speak volumes. ......

.....

 

And since you can use the "File Placement Rules" to control that.... you could add a SSD or two to the pool, and use the rules to ensure that's where the VMs are stored. Great for performance. 

 

 

There is no issue with duplicating the VMs. If Real-Time Duplication is enabled (which it is by default), any write or modify commands are sent to both copies of the files at the same time, and the contents stay in sync.  

And again, by using the file placement rules, it allows you to maintain one pool, without sacrificing the speed that you want. But that is entirely up to you.

 

Let's take a worse case scenario and say I have an SSD and a USB2 drive in my duplicated drive pool. I use file placement rules to place my VM on the SSD. If it is duplicated, it is duplicated on the USB2 drive. Wouldn't the VM only be as fast as the slowest drive since it is being written to? Or are the writes cached?

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