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Hi All,
I've been staying away from Windows, but I'm at a point where I need to get some experience Windows and Intune. So I thought I should install a few Windows 11 VMs to test. To that end, I wanted to revive and try my 10+ year old desktop computer before deciding to build a new one. So very old parts:
* AMD FX-8320 8-ish(*) core CPU
* 32GB of RAM (maxed out)
* 2x 320GB 2.5" drives I kept when upgrading my laptops through the years.
I don't want to buy SSDs at the moment as the motherboard does not support NVME, and if the final decision is to build a new computer, I would prefer going NVME directly. Adapters are also not an option as I need my PCIe slots for graphics cards, among other reasons.
I normally use ZFS almost everywhere on my personal machines, but I wanted to hear what you would do *with the available parts* in terms of QEMU images. I don't need any kind of redundancy on this system as it will be short-lived test VMs. And likely no advanced features of ZFS like snapshots etc.
1. ZFS with 1 disk per vdev: Pros would be possible gains from compression (less data read/written from/to disks) and good caching performance, at the expense of processing power and memory. Assuming 3 Windows 7 VMs running at any time, with low load, do you think the processing and memory overhead would be a bottleneck?
2. Plain old software RAID0, with XFS on top. Assuming XFS would give me an edge for QEMU images being large files, and less overhead than ZFS. Cons would be the need for more data to read/write on spinning rust in the absence of compression, and maybe less efficient caching.
3. Any other ideas?
Thanks in advance for any input on this!
Last edited by octinum (2023-12-12 09:11:18)
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