TBH Ed I won’t be straining them that hard.
Now the i5 laptop has 12GB of ram it was only being held back by a 120GB SSD which just wasn’t enough for anything of any size or multiple VMs.
Just found an interesting snippet on heavy disk i/o here http://tinyurl.com/yacqvr2v
Contrary to popular belief (if you’re a nerd like me), Windows OS does I/O queueing by disk controller, not by drive. So do the hypervisors – all of them, KVM included (what’s underneath many of the hypervisors out there if it’s not VMware or Hyper-V). By adding additional disk controllers for VMs that are incredibly heavy with I/O demand, we provide more I/O queues for Windows to leverage to independently channel the I/O out of the OS. The hypervisor works in a similar manner, and with both of these in place, we can reduce the latency induced inside Windows and the hypervisor and improve performance. You can see this on very hungry for I/O VMs by looking at Windows Perfmon disk latency metrics, and compare them with the hypervisor-layer metrics. You’ll notice that during heavy I/O windows, Windows will probably show greater latency to disk per drive than the hypervisor reports. This is the Windows layer queueing up and delaying the I/O requests slightly.
So, do your testing and due diligence on your particular environment, and if you find that spreading out your workload among multiple drive controllers improves your performance, make it your standard!
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