I'm trying to get the best performance out ofan Ubuntu VMs that with have to read and write huge files (100Gb+, 200Gb+, etc), so I'm testing out single drive, RAID 1, and RAID 0 hard drive configurations on the host to see which will give me the best I/O performance on the VM. Right now the host operating system is Windows 7. Windows 7 and Virtualbox 4.0.8 are installed on 1 hard drive and there are two other matching hard drives that will be used solely for the VM. Those drives will be setup in RAID 1 or RAID 0 and that volume will be where the default virtual machine folder is. This first picture below is of the benchmarks for one of the drives.
- Windows 7 Host Computer benchmarks for the disk storing the Ubuntu VM. These benchmarks agree with published benchmarks for that hard dri
- HDTune_Benchmark_Single_SAMSUNG_HE103SJ#1.png (26.52 KiB) Viewed 546 times
Now here is the benchmarks for an Ubuntu VM that is on that same single disk. Notice how high the read speeds are.
- Ubuntu 10 VM benchmarks for a VDI existing on the same disk as the previous picture. These benchmarks are wildly inaccurate.
- Screenshot-322 GB Hard Disk (ATA VBOX HARDDISK) – Benchmark_Single_Drive.png (92.25 KiB) Viewed 546 times
I've noticed this issue on Ubuntu VMs on other hosts besides for this one. Does anyone know a way to get accurate read/write benchmarks for disks in an Ubuntu VM?