TABLE OF CONTENTS Virtual machines have many properties that are similar to physical machines. When Configuring a virtual machine, the most important properties are memory and disks, because they have the most impact on the host. As with physical machines, virtual machines contain an operating system, applications, and data. Depending on its role, the virtual machine may have one or many virtual hard disks.
Most applications these days are disk I/O intensive. These applications perform many read and write operations from and to the hard disk, so performance is basically determined by the underlying disk I/O subsystem. When they perform heavy disk I/O they are called disk bound.
Disk I/O in a physical machine is basically the slowest I/O compared to processor and memory I/O; therefore, a good performing storage subsystem benefits performance of those applications and, as such, overall performance of the virtual machine.
Virtual Server provides its virtual machines with several types of disks. These disks are not physical disks; this would not scale well with many virtual machines and many disks in each virtual machine.
Virtual Server emulates disks, which are called virtual disks. To a guest operating system inside a virtual machine, these virtual disks are the same as those in a physical machine. They behave the same and have the same limitations, determined by their emulated characteristics.
Virtual Server emulates different kinds of disks that are common in today s physical machines. Those can be categorized as either removable disks or hard disks.
Removable...
