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Disks and Partitions on Virtual Machines |
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Disks and Partitions on Virtual Machines
DriversLSI Logic Disc (your best choice and default) | Performance increase in Windows 2003 but not much difference in Windows 2000 | | Driver for Windows 2003 included in the system | | Driver for Windows XP or Windows 2000 have to be downloaded and added during the setup of the guest system (press F6 key and supply the floppy driver image)
Download the driver from www.lsilogic.com/download/ look for LSI20320 Driver
Unzip the files and copy them to a floppy disk
Create a floppy image with dd on the console or Windows freeware utility dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/local/bootfloppy1.img bs=1440k This command creates a floppy image quickly. You can also use the freeware Emt4win utility for Windows download to create floppy images |
BuslogicIf you use the Buslogic driver or like to upgrade an IDE based Virtual disk, download the driver floppyimage from the VMware download site to achieve enhanced SCSI device performance.
Don't use Buslogic on Windows 2003 Server or you will loose significant performance! Buslogic Driver download SCSI Disk Drivers (for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 Guest Operating Systems). Follow the instructions on the Web site. RAW DiskWith RAW Disks you have direct access to an local or the SAN SCSI Disk. With ESX 2.5 VMware introduced the new future of disk mapping files. You use an .vmdk file on a VMFS volume which points to the raw entire LUN. The mapping file stores the metadata for the LUN. This mapping files enables VMotion also for RAW Disks because the Disk information is available on the mapping file on VMFS.Use of mapping file: | VMotion | | Clustered Virtual Machines data disks | | Physical to virtual clusters |
| Physical
Virtualization of the disk is limited
Preferred if SAN snapshot technology is used | | Virtual
Disk will act like any ordinary Virtual Disk. You will be able to change its modes like redo logs |
| Lun must be on the SAN | | LUN cant contain any VMFS or core dump partition | | LUN is not on an SCSI controller being shared wit the ESX service console | | LUN must provide unique ID | | Use an completly raw unused LUN | | Place the mapping file on a Volume accessible from all ESX servers |
Disk Modes Requierments |
