VMWare Server: Virtual Hard Drive Type

Question

For best performance, is it better to use a virtual IDE HDD or virtual SCSI HDD? If, SCSI, does it matter whether you use an BusLogic or LSILogic?

Answer 1

Go for the SCSI and LSILogic. IDE and BusLogic are for compatibility reasons. Like when you do physical2virtual...

There's a whitepaper from vmware showing the difference between LSILogic and BusLogic, which in my opinion is rather small: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ESX2_Storage_Performance.pdf

Edit after like three years: With current ESX environments it's best to use the Paravirtual SCSI device.

Answer 2

I don't think that your choice of Virtual Disk type in VMWare matters for performance. What matters is the following: How much memory you have (the more the better), How many CPU cores you have (the more the better), and more specifically about disks, what matters most is the speed of the physical drive (a 15K RPM SCSI drive being best). If you have, for example, 3 physical HDs and 3 virtual HDs, then I would place one virtual HD in each physical HD. This is known to improve virtual HD performance. Also keep your virtual HDs defragmented.