Speeding Ahead with ZFS and VirtualBox | Linux Today

Speeding Ahead with ZFS and VirtualBox

Written By
Web Webster
Web Webster
Oct 8, 2015

In total, I have about 20 virtual hosts I take care of across a few workstations. On one system alone, I keep five running constantly, doing builds and network monitoring. At work, my Ubuntu workstation has two Windows VMs I use regularly. My home workstation has about eight: a mix of Fedora(s) and Windows.

A lot of my Windows use is pretty brief: doing test installs, doing web page compatibility checking, and using TeamViewer. Sometimes, a VM goes bonkers and you have to roll-back to a previous version of the VM; and sometimes VirtualBox’s snapshots are useful for that. On my home workstation, I have some hosts with about 18 snapshots and they are hard to scroll through they scroll to the right across the window  How insightful. Chopping out a few snapshots in the middle of that pile is madness. Whatever Copy on Write (COW) de-duplication they end up doing takes ???fuhevvuh.??? It’s faster to compress all the snapshots into a new VM of one snapshot.

Web Webster

Web Webster

Web Webster has more than 20 years of writing and editorial experience in the tech sector. He’s written and edited news, demand generation, user-focused, and thought leadership content for business software solutions, consumer tech, and Linux Today, he edits and writes for a portfolio of tech industry news and analysis websites including webopedia.com, and DatabaseJournal.com.

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