I would like to hear how and where people are storing their VM's.

 

Questions I would like to see people talk about are:

 

SSD vs Spindle, is there a huge performance difference on a VM? Is there going to be a performance boost on an Arch VM with the usual apps including Plex?

Would an SSD be worth it for a Windows VM being used just to run apps?

What format should the drive be in, which is the best format?

Whats the best way to store a VM, LVM or .img container according to ironic:

For the best performance, ideally, you want to run the Windows VM from within an LVM container but at the moment unRAID does not support this. So for now, we'll just use a .img container despite the performance hit.

 

In the VM on USB thread there was talk about how to mount an out of array drive. One method is to use the SNAP plugin. Other is just to add a few lines to your go script. I know I got this from someone on here, I'll try to reference it later.

 

First format your drive, you can add it as a cache drive and unraid will format it, just assign your original cache drive back after.

Add this this to your go script and edit the red to your needs.

mkdir -p /mnt/VMdrive/

mount -t reiserfs -o rw,noacl,nouser_xattr /dev/sda1 /mnt/VMdrive/

You can also add this to your flash in the config folder, create a file called smb-extra.conf. This will allow the drive to be seen vis smb (over the network)

[VMdrive]

  path = /mnt/VMdrive

  read only = no

  guest ok = yes

  browseable = yes

  public = yes

 

I am by no means an expert so if there is a better way to do anything I'm all ears and will update this.

 

Thanks for the samba.conf, forgot about that.  I currently am running on an extra SSD that I did exactly the same as you and formatted as cache drive then mount in go script.  I have the arch vm and a ubuntu/mythbuntu vm with a 1TB drive for live tv buffer and recordings.  All are outside the array.  I back the vm's up on the array.

 

SSDs are cheap anymore and almost every computer, laptop, or desktop I have runs so much faster with them, so why not run the vm's off them. The only other thing I want to do is add another SSD for downloads that are then transferred to the array.