I start of with a screenshop of my disk setup:

 

 

So, I had a lot of problems with my Win10 VM.

 

I was running it off the vdisk share that was set to cache only. After lots of frustration I finally found out that the cache disk was running out of space. (I wasn't thinking of the other things that uses the cache disk when assigning VM disc space.)

 

Anyway, moved the image to a share on the array, and it's been working with no bigger issues since then.

However it is much slower than when on the cache SSD's.

 

My VM image is 100GB now. I use some large software, and I think it looks like a hassle to put some programs under program files into a seperate image. (My games are on a image on the normal share though.)

 

What would you do in my situation?

 

I'm thinking of making the cache 1 SSD only, and move the image to the other SSD (is that even possible?)

 

My main goal is to have my Win 10 VM on SSD.

My installed files are now 60-ish GB, so that means I can shrink it to 80GB as a minimum. Will it then run fine in cache only given my disc setup?

 

What are my options?

 

 

I'm thinking of making the cache 1 SSD only, and move the image to the other SSD (is that even possible?)

 

Yes, as long as you don't mind losing the cache redundancy.

 

You can remove one of you cache SSDs using this procedure, then use the unassigned devices plugin to mount it and host your VM.

Other option is to change your cache pool profile to RAID0 or single, doubling its space, also at the cost of pool redundancy.

Thanks!

 

I will look into that.

Is it a good idea to add a SSD to the array (as disk 4), and set up a share (for VM's) to only use that disk?

Then also specify all the other shares to use disk1, disk2 and disk3 only? (No failover)

 

Or is it better to just swap out my cache disks with 2x250GB SSD, and run the VM's of cache only? (maybe easier to manage?)

 

What is best practice?

Don't recommend running VMs on the protected array, even if you use a SSD, writes will be very slow due to the parity disk.

 

Use the cache disk (or pool) or the unassigned devices plugin.

Thanks!

I think I'll go for the bigger cache pool then.