VHD's vs Physical Disks

[wroberts]

Hi All,

 

Was just wondering whether you guys had noticed a difference in performance between Virtual Disks and Physical Disks

 

I know VHD's have there obvious advantages (Felxibility, Expandablility) but do you lose Read Write speed on a Virtual disk or not ?

 

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated

 

Regards

 

Will

[dhicks]

Was just wondering whether you guys had noticed a difference in performance between Virtual Disks and Physical Disks

 

I've set up our main file server with a disk array passed through directly as a device available to the VM rather than putting a disk image on the disk array and having the VM system pass a virtual harddrive to the VM. I doubt there is much performance overhead really, and seemingly VHD provides rather better snapshot performance than Linux's LVM does.

[Arthur]

The performance difference between a fixed VHDX and a pass-through disk is negligible really (2-4%).

[HPlum78]

Here is a the whitepaper released on this subject for server 2k08, I have not looked but I guess they have redone the tests with 2k12.

WS08_R2_VHD_Performance_WhitePaper.docx