Mark Knecht schrieb:
> Hi,
>    I'm wondering if anyone has opinions (on this list? Right...) as to
> the best file system type for running vmware images of Windows XP. As
> best I can tell an 8GB C: drive shows up as 4x 2GB files and 1.5GB
> DRAM is modeled in a file of its own:
> 
[...]I suspect XFS, Reiser or
> something other than ext3 that I'm currently using would possibly make
> a difference?
> 
>    But would it be a big difference? How would I test it? I.e. - not
> that XFS is or isn't a good file system but that it actually helps
> with vmware operation?
> 
>    My current system is AMD64, 4GB DRAM, i5 Core which is 4 processor
> threads. Target machine is AMD64, i7 Core or possibly dual XEON, 16GB,
> 4-6 monitors and multiple 1TB+ drives in some sort of RAID mainly for
> speed, and then additionally an external RAID for backup.
> 

As an educated guess, I would say that ext4's usage of extents should
improve the performance on large files by a measurable margin.

As one of the last filesystem drivers which still use the Big Kernel
Lock, I would also guess that Reiserfs might not scale well to heavily
multithreaded usage or multicore CPUs. However, I cannot say if this has
any kind of noticable effect on 4-8 core machines.

As Roberto Waltman already suggested, benchmarking is the way to go.


By the way, as you mention RAID. Note that on pure read operations, a
RAID1 can be as good or even better than a RAID0 because read operations
can be distributed freely among the disks since all of them contain all
data.

Hope this helps
Florian Philipp