virtualbox.org

I just read an interesting article at http://www.howtoforge.com/using-xen-wit ... ebian-etch

I'm wondering if this approach could be applied to the VirtualBox architecture. It might be an extremely useful effort.

Yes you can use LVM partitions as raw vmdk mapped partitions, but doing the benchmarks, we find little speed advantage in any raw partition techniques over a reasonable well managed Ext3 partition and VDIs.

However I do keep my VDIs on LVM logical volumes. Why? General flexibility and the ability to take hot backups of VDIs through snapshots.

Thanks. I can comfortably forget about that idea now...I used to run VDIs in LVM logical volumes on a 64-bit SuSE 10.1 host OS, but quit doing so about a year ago because I was having stability issues with the combination of RAID0/LVM/ReiserFS. Now, older and wiser, I just run ReiserFS, no RAID0 or LVM. Sometimes simpler seems to be better...

Looking at the various benchmarks, I am not sure the ReiserFS is really suited to host VBox, which is dominated by the large disk image files, and for these there is little compare between Ext3 and ReiserFS.

XFS seems to perform better than Ext3 for VBox type applications but there are all sorts of health warning about using XFS on a PC because of the sequence that the drives and CPU fail is you have a power outage. With XFS a UPS is pretty much essential.

However, overall Ext3 seems robust and comparable in performance to alternatives so I just stick with Ext3. It's pity Mr Reiser turned to murder. I was looking forward to Reiser4, but the man's incarceration for 2nd degreee murder seems to have killed this. I am now waiting expectantly at Ext4 plus Ubuntu 9.04