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I am creating a system for testing performance in virtualized environments. I have created a Windows 2016 VM that contains various tools for simulating load (such as stressing the CPU, or allocating RAM) and I have written a collection of scripts to clone that VM and then run the load tools with various parameters. I intend for the VM to be simultaneously run on many hosts to examine how the cluster runs under load.
A problem is the length of time it takes the VM to be cloned. The image is around 7GB in size, and so on our slow SANs it takes several minutes to create each new VM. I am searching for solutions to reduce this.
I wonder: is it possible to construct a windows system partition in such a way that it is readonly: that the contents of that partition never change? All volatile data should be on a separate partition, with only static executables and data files on the system partition. That way, I could set several VMs to all boot from the same shared hard drive and so minimize cloning times.
Is such a thing achievable? I wonder if the 'Windows To Go' feature released in Windows 8 enterprise does something similar.
Oliver
Posted 2016-04-14T10:35:15.020
Reputation: 314
I think the term for this is linked clones. Depending on your Hypervisor there are either native ways or tricks to achieve this. – Spokey – 2016-04-14T12:07:28.653
@Spokey Unfortunately the performance overhead introduced by linked clones means that I am unable to use them in my environment. – Oliver – 2016-04-14T12:08:24.077
Yeah I see, however I don't think you can achieve this a the VM level. You might achieve that with a live CD possibly (Windows To Go wants to do it with USB storage devices). However newer Windows versions currently do not support it. – Spokey – 2016-04-14T12:40:10.680