Best Practices for Integrity Virtual Machines

7/19

Getting the Most from Virtual I/O

Virtual Mass Storage

Given the availability of so many storage technologies and means of securing them, the versatility of

Integrity VM mass storage provides a multitude of options. However, there are scenarios where some

of these options are not prudent.

In general, the best I/O performance for VMs is obtained by mapping virtual disks directly to entire

physical disks (or LUNs corresponding to SAN storage). Workloads that require large storage

capacity should define storage in this way wherever possible. This approach is illustrated in Figure 2.

Doing so will provide the workloads with access to all the performance capability of these disks, not

having to share them with other workloads. In such scenarios, the only reason to use files or logical

volumes for virtual hard disks is convenience. Otherwise, the configuration may be unnecessarily

complicated as outlined in

Figure 3.

Figure 2 – Whenever virtual mass storage capacity requirements are large,

mapping virtual disks to physical storage is more efficient and less complex.

Integrity VM Host

40G 40G 40G 40G