I run a linux host-server (vmware-server 1.0.6) and need to setup a VM with 500GB mirrored harddisk. So I decided to use a physical disk and not a virtualdisk for performance-issues and my plan was the following:
i) set up a raid1 on the host-system.
ii) use this raid-disk as physical disk for the gues-system where I can access it as sda
But the plan does not work. Vmware refuses to accept my raid-device as physical disk.
I tried to different approaches:
1) create pure software-raid /dev/md0 with mdadm
2) use the pseudo-raid-adapter on my tyan-board where the raid-device is /dev/mapper/isw_cihbfgdiag_guest then.
Both devices are not accepted in the add-hardware-wizard. I even tried to manually edit the vmdk-files to smuggle in the correct device, but vmware complains : "Failed to retrieve disk information for" .
My questions:
is there a way to use a host-raid as physical disk for the guest? how or why not?
does it even make sense what I'm attempting to do. I could easily setup a software-raid in the guest-system, but I thought it might be much faster, if I do so in the host-system. (disk I/O seems to be much faster/cheaper on the host than on the guest)
thnx,
peter