Running multiple virtual machines from a single SSD?


Recommended Posts

Hi all,

Just a very quick question - I run a lot of VMs on my desktop PC (5 VMs, with 3 hard drives)

Unfortunately I cannot add more because my computer is a Dell and I'm already having to use a screw for where a fan (or something) goes to hold a hard drive in position, so I have a choice to make...

Should I ditch one of my hard drives for a much smaller SSD, and would I notice a big performance increase if (for example) I ran 4 VMs from that single SSD, and one on my storage hard drive? (freeing up the drive with the Windows install on in the process)

Thanks

  On 23/09/2011 at 13:51, blizeH said:

Hi all,

Just a very quick question - I run a lot of VMs on my desktop PC (5 VMs, with 3 hard drives)

Unfortunately I cannot add more because my computer is a Dell and I'm already having to use a screw for where a fan (or something) goes to hold a hard drive in position, so I have a choice to make...

Should I ditch one of my hard drives for a much smaller SSD, and would I notice a big performance increase if (for example) I ran 4 VMs from that single SSD, and one on my storage hard drive? (freeing up the drive with the Windows install on in the process)

Thanks

You would need a lot of space and a lot of money for that. SSD drives are still expensive verses space you get.

  On 23/09/2011 at 13:54, majortom1981 said:

You would need a lot of space and a lot of money for that. SSD drives are still expensive verses space you get.

Thanks, but each VM requires maybe 15GB (at most) of space to run an old Windows XP install, so an 80GB drive could be perfect for it

  On 23/09/2011 at 13:51, blizeH said:

Should I ditch one of my hard drives for a much smaller SSD, and would I notice a big performance increase if (for example) I ran 4 VMs from that single SSD, and one on my storage hard drive? (freeing up the drive with the Windows install on in the process)

You likely have a lot of contention if you have multiple VMs running from a single hard drive (or even two). A SSD will definitley help you relieve some of that, and at the least, as you said, free up your Windows drive.

You will notice a performace increase. Will it be big? Depends. But you will see one.

Make sure though if you plan to run from a SSD, that you reconfigure your VM manager to see the drive as SSD and apply TRIM, etc. I know VirtualBox added support. Otherwise you'll wear out your drive prematurely, but it would take awhile.

Ah you're a star, thank you - lots of things to consider then.

I've actually moved one of the VMs off the drive with the Windows install and have seen a big performance increase already... I'm thinking to run a hard drive check every so often, and if there are any problems (that can't be fixed) quickly switch out that drive for an SSD one maybe, but at the moment it could be wasteful when I'm not sure just how much of a performance boost I'll see?

Thanks again

IMHO You are going to trash the ssd quickly. VMs do lots of reads/writes.

If choose to do so, insure you have disabled last access time for files and directories, turned off swap and any logging you can and put as much as possible ram so more disc content is buffered (there was some hidden option to set how much ram is used for buffering in XP).

Also set your vm disk sizes to a fixed value so they don't shrink/expand and disable defragmentation (and indexing) from both host and guest.

Ah nice one, thank you - some great advice... should I do that stuff even before making the switch to SSD? Would it help with my current setup?

Ideally I'd just have 5 hard drives (or 6, one for each VM, and an SSD for my main drive!) but that isn't possible unfortunately, unless I get a whole new PC ;_;

are you running vmware vsphere? that is a bare metal hypervisor that runs the VMs with no underlying operating system needed.

This is an ideal solution. Most people in the hosting industry use this. You start from there and work your way up to a nice vmware datacenter setup

http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/overview.html

http://www.vmware.com/products/datacenter-virtualization/

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • Because Win7 was beautiful, much faster and more functional than XP. Win10 (glossing over 8 as many do) was slightly faster in some cases, more functional in some cases, but some people such as myself hated how it looked and decided it wasn't worth the upgrade. Some people liked (or were ok with) the look, and thus it is a good upgrade. Win11 is like 10, but is less functional between key features being removed and constant bugs/crashes either due to updates, or just things that were never patched. It literally has nothing going for it, and I use it every day at work so I'm quite familiar with it.
    • I switched my mom from Chrome to Firefox and she had a serious meltdown. She even managed to figure out how to reinstall Chrome, which really surprised me. What finally got her to switch was Chrome no longer being supported on Win7 and me putting a Chrome skin on FF, and setting it up identically.
    • Feels very much like most other gnome based Linux distros. There is minimal amounts that are influenced by Windows 11, maybe just enough to make people who are switching comfortable enough with the idea. As far as I can tell its mainly just turning the 'taskbar' panel as a 100% sized static panel, rather than the default dynamic sized. Turning it from the Mac OS Dock into the Windows taskbar. The Arc Menu - that I assume you're taking not with from the screenshots, is indeed the Windows 11 style one, but it has lots of other options too, from the more traditional gnome, Windows 7 etc. Still free to install what ever Window Manager you want once you're comfortable enough with Linux though.
    • Wow, and here I'm still happily using 1080p...
    • Added an extra filter to Fail2Ban.  I thought about just adding this to my existing aibots filter, but for the time being I'm keeping it separate because it's "possible" real humans may trigger this one so as long as it doesn't start filling my inbox I'd like to get notified about these so I can adjust it as necessary in the future. I'm still holding close to 10k unique IP addresses at any given time that have been banned via the "aibots" filter that looks for certain user agent strings of known AI scrapers.  However, I've been getting an increasing amount of traffic trying to scrape the site with sanitized user agent strings that just look like normal web browsers, however... Because I enabled authentication I can now see that they're racking up lots of 401 (unauthorized) responses in the Apache "access.log" file, but they're not triggering anything in the Apache "error.log" file, which is where failed attempts to log in would appear.  Basically, if an actual human tried to log in with an invalid username and password they don't immediately go into "access.log" as a 401, they go into "error.log" with a status message such as "user FOO not found".  The only way to trigger a 401 simply by visiting the site, as far as I'm aware, is to hit "Cancel" on the login prompt, or otherwise try to access files directly without properly authenticating. So, given the fact I'm getting a few thousand 401 errors a day from sanitized user agent strings that don't show up in "error.log", which means no attempt at logging in properly, I added another jail/filter set to Fail2Ban to immediately ban anybody who triggers a 401.  This feels a bit nuclear so I may need to adjust it in the future, but as far as I'm aware so far no real humans are being inconvenienced so all I'm doing is wasting the time of some AI scraper bots. Example log entry 61.170.149.70 - - [25/Jun/2025:20:01:04 -0400] "GET /content/mdwiki_en_all_maxi_2024-06/A/Neuroregeneration HTTP/1.1" 401 3287 "https://kiwix.marcusadams.me/content/mdwiki_en_all_maxi_2024-06/A/Neuroregeneration" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/114.0.1823.43" Contents of /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-401repeat.conf #Fail2Ban filter for bots and scrapers that try to access #files directly without entering credentials for apache2-auth #and therefore trigger lots of 401 errors without triggering #the apache-auth jail. # #Marcus Dean Adams [Definition] failregex = ^<HOST> .+\" 401 \d+ .*$ Contents of /etc/fail2ban/jail.d/apache-401repeat.local [apache-401repeat] enabled = true ignoreip = 10.1.1.1 port = 80,443 filter = apache-401repeat maxretry = 1 bantime = 672h findtime = 10m logpath = /var/log/apache2/access.log Oh, and all this traffic is AFTER I explicitly banned Alibaba's IP ranges that were absolutely blowing me up day and night. Observation; two of the IP addresses that have triggered this jail in the 30 or so minutes since I turned it on were owned by Microsoft.  Wonder if they're doing their own AI scraping/probing, or if that's just an Azure VM owned by somebody else.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Rising Star
      Phillip0web went up a rank
      Rising Star
    • One Month Later
      Epaminombas earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • One Year In
      Bert Fershner earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Reacting Well
      ChrisOdinUK earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • One Year In
      Steviant earned a badge
      One Year In
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      552
    2. 2
      ATLien_0
      208
    3. 3
      +FloatingFatMan
      175
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      152
    5. 5
      Som
      139
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!