You can improve throughput for virtual hard disks by using the following techniques:
- Use a hard disk solution that allows fast access, such as a SCSI hard disk, a redundant array of independent disks (RAID), or storage area network (SAN).
- Put each virtual hard disk on a dedicated volume, SCSI hard disk, RAID, or SAN. It is easiest to put virtual hard disks together with their associated virtual machine configuration files on a RAID or SAN because this keeps everything in one place.
- Put virtual hard disks on a different physical disk than the host operating system. In particular, you want to put virtual hard disks on a different physical disk than the host page file.
- Reduce disk fragmentation. Defragment the physical disk on a regular basis, especially if you are using a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk. The data stored on a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk will grow increasingly fragmented as the size of the disk grows, because storage space is used only as it is needed. As the size grows it is less likely that the space will be contiguous. By contrast, a fixed-size virtual hard disk uses a reserved block of storage space, which means that data is less likely to be fragmented as it is stored.
- Compact virtual hard disks to free more physical disk space.
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