[Discuss] Using raw host hard disk in virtual client

[Rich Pieri]

In my experience, if you're going to use either VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion or VirtualBox then you really shouldn't bother with raw disk access.  It's a pain to configure and if you make a mistake then you can destroy things like your operating system.  As long as you have sufficient RAM to cache disk I/O on the host the performance overhead is going to be negligible compared to the overhead incurred by the user-mode hypervisors.  And if that performance hit is unacceptable then you shouldn't be virtualizing in the first place.

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Rich P.