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In my current setup I'm using both Windows and Linux hosts, I've a bunch of VM in a partition and I need to use and access them from either hosts.

I've tested a couple of filesystems with very poor results:

  • NTFS: on linux the NTFS implementation runs in usermode with fuse and it's unbelievable slow, the VM runs at 1fps and the whole host system is thrashing.
  • exFAT: same as NTFS
  • FAT32: It seems to work well but the lack of journal and other features scares me a bit and I don't know if it's a good idea to keep VM there

Is there a more intelligent way to shares VMs betweens two hosts?

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    Consider using native partitions for your VMs.
    – mspasov
    Sep 1, 2014 at 7:56
  • @mspasov raw partitions are a feature only available for VMware Workstation, aren't they?
    – Federico
    Sep 1, 2014 at 8:13
  • VMware Workstation, Player and VirtualBox all support raw disks/partitions.
    – mspasov
    Sep 1, 2014 at 8:33

1 Answer 1

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I use FAT32 with a preallocated/2G split VMDK and have never had problems: The point being, that the metadata on the file system never changes (apart from file times) - this mitigates most of FAT32's weaknesses - running FAT32 with any growing file is a risk you might or might not be willing to take.

What remains is FAT32's lack of access permissions - you will have to decide, whether that's a show-stopper.

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  • Right now I'm using FAT32 with 2G VMDK split but they are growing and not preallocated. What risks can I face using this setup instead of a preallocated VMDK files?
    – Federico
    Sep 1, 2014 at 14:04
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    Growing VMDKs do involve the weaknesses of FAT - metadata updates, fragmentation etc. For me, the loss of thin provisioning is more acceptable than that. Sep 1, 2014 at 14:06

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