[Discuss] Is ext4 still dangerous for vmware client?

[Bill Bogstad]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 9:34 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (blu)
<blu at nedharvey.com> wrote:
>> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
>> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Jerry Natowitz
>>
>> I'm thinking of taking the plunge and setting up a Linux client on Windows 7.
>> A while ago I read that ext4 for certain, and possibly ext3 had problems with
>> corruption when used within vmware clients.
>>
>> If that was true, is it still the case?
>>
>> Also, should I be looking at using LVM so that I can more easily migrate to
>> larger "disks"?
>
> Never heard of that problem.  Do it all the time.  Never had a problem.  Also at work, deploy and support this exact setup for users, who also never had any such problem.  And it also strikes me as illogical anyway - why would ext4 specifically care if it was running inside a VM or physical hardware?  That's kind of the point of a VM - the guest needn't know or care that it is a VM.

Well now that you mention it, VirtualBox does care if VM images are
stored on an ext4 filesystem.   (i.e. Linux host running VirtualBox
and using ext4 fs to store VM images.)  VB complains if the host cache
is disabled in the VM's setup.   So the guest OS doesn't care, but the
VM software does.  Or at least that's what I've seen when I try to set
things up that way.  I've never tracked down the technical reason for
VB's concern though.

Bill Bogstad