In other words, don't manipulate passthrough disks, except through the VM, unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise, like needing to move data on or off the drive in bulk. Keep passthrough disks untouchedĬonsider passthrough disks "untouchable" by the host - except by way of the VM they're assigned to. Attaching drives via USB or FireWire for passthrough disks isn't recommended or supported for a variety of reasons, including the performance of those drives, the limitations imposed by the bus and the greater possibility of an accidental disconnection of the drive. Most desktops have only the first two (and usually only SATA) types available anyway. You should attach passthrough disks directly to the system via SATA, iSCSI or Fibre Channel. No USB or FireWire, pleaseĭon't manipulate passthrough disks except through the VM. However, you cannot and should not use USB-attached Flash storage for desktop VMs. You can use solid-state drives for an even bigger boost in performance - if you can afford it. Use a 7200 RPM or better disk that supports the fastest available transfer speeds on the bus you're using (SATA 6.0 GB/sec, for instance). That means there's all the more need for the disk to be fast. Instead of working with a file on a disk that's managed by the host, the VM works directly with a disk. Passthrough disks enhance VM performance by omitting a layer of abstraction in the file system.
If you're going to use passthrough disks for VMs that support virtual desktops, here are some pointers to get the most out of the technology. To run VMs on the machine on which I'm typing, I had to spend the money to get a whopping 8 SATA ports. For instance, servers are designed to support more physical disks than desktop machines by default. They can improve VM performance but also come with some challenges in a virtual desktop environment. Passthrough disks connect to the virtual machine (VM) and serve as a storage source with an existing file system and disk file format.
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