VMwW Installation + VM Image Locations...??

[DEVIOUZ]

I was wondering what the best way to install VM-Ware Workstation would be..

Is there any performance improvements at all if you install VMwW on the same HDD/SDD as the OS..??

Or What if you Install VMwW on a HDD/SSD that's separate from the OS..??

And what about Having Both VMwW + VM Images both installed on the same Disk..??

Which setup works best..??

I was contemplating Installing VMwW onto my main OS Drive which is an SSD, an then installing the VM Images onto this HDD

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136555

But my main concern is which Setup/Installation will provide the best performance..??

Should I install VMwW onto the same drive that contains the OS or VM Images or does it even matter at all..??

What do you VM-Ware Experts out there recommend..??

[Scissor]

Doesn't matter where you install the VMware Workstation binaries. I would suggest just using the default location (C:\Program Files....)

I do recommend putting your Guests on a separate hard drive. That way if any of your Guests have high disk IO it won't cause your Host OS to pause/stall/freeze.

[DEVIOUZ]

If I'm going to be running (8-10) multiple VM's simultaneously for long periods of time.. How many VM's should I Run/Store per each HDD/SSD..? so the Disk that contains the VM Guests doesn't get over saturated with constant heavy I/O..??

[Scissor]

If I'm going to be running (8-10) multiple VM's simultaneously for long periods of time.. How many VM's should I Run/Store per each HDD/SSD..? so the Disk that contains the VM Guests doesn't get over saturated with constant heavy I/O..??

Well a SATA hard drive can provide approximately 90 IOPS. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS )

You then need to determine the IOPS used by each of your Guests and plan accordingly. According to ( http://www.vmguru.nl/wordpress/2009/12/vmware-view-sizing-best-practices/ ) a XP Guest uses between 5 - 20 IOPS.

But it all depends on how you utilize your Guests. If you only work with one Guest at a time and the other Guests are mostly idle, you could easily run 10 VMs off a single SATA drive. You'd only see pain points if you restarted all 10 Guests at the same time (or ran an AntiVirus scan on all 10 Guests at the same time).

[Scissor]

After reviewing the stated IOPS performance of SSD drives, perhaps you should consider running your Guests off the same SSD drive that your Host OS is using Depends if your SSD drive has enough room.

[DEVIOUZ]

Wouldn't running Guest VM's off the same SSD drive that your Host OS is using degrade the performance of both OS and Guest VM's since they're both using & competing for the same resources..

Wouldn't it be better If I were to use 2 of these SSD's 1 for the OS and the Other for VM's only..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227528

[Scissor]

Wouldn't running Guest VM's off the same SSD drive that your Host OS is using degrade the performance of both OS and Guest VM's since they're both using & competing for the same resources..

Theorectically yes. But IOPS stats for SSD drives appear to be much higher than for traditional spinning platter hard drives so perhaps a single fast SSD drive could handle it? I personally have not experimented with running Guests off a SSD drive though so I can't answer for sure.

Wouldn't it be better If I were to use 2 of these SSD's 1 for the OS and the Other for VM's only..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227528

If you have the budget for it, then yes go for multiple SSDs. A 50 GB SSD is kind of small to host 10 Guests though... For the same $189 price I personally went with two 1 TB SATA drives set up in a RAID1 configuration giving me 1 TB of redundant disk for my Guests.