Re: Poor VMWare disk performance on XFS partition

[Russell Cattelan <cattelan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jan Derfinak wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Mar 2008, Hendrik . wrote:
>
>   
> > I've been converting some of my drives from EXT3 to
> > XFS a while ago. Now I notice poor disk performance
> > when using XFS as underlying filesystem for a VMware
> > virtual drive. I did some experiments and it really
> > seems to be the XFS filesystem 'trashing' the speed of
> > a VMware Windows XP guest.
> >     
>
> Mount XFS partition with "nobarrier" option. I'm using also
> logbufs=8,logbsize=256k for vmware.
>
> jan
>
>   
I can verify that ... barriers are killers when running vmware guest 
disk/memory images.

The preallocation would also help out quite bit if you don't mind 
dedicating the
disk space vs the sparse file method, which allow for over subscribing 
the physical
space. Going through once in a while and shutting down the guests and 
defragmenting
it a good idea.

I would be interested to find out the results of seekwatcher on shutdown
but I have also seen the long shutdowns.

-Russell