Optimizing linux host for vmware

I run Debian as host operating system on my T60p. My work environment requires me to have Windows due to incompatibility with some internal applications and hence, I have chosen to use Vmware to virtualize windows XP on top of debian host.

Vmware gives option to either select physical disk or virtual disks (.vmdk). Since virtual disks provide option to resize/shrink as per need, I chose latter over former. Virtual disks are divided into 2Gb chunks which reside on local filesystem on host. We can be smart and make use of filesystem which is optimized for larger files.

Our Business infrastructure requires us to have encrypted disks so let's first create an encrypted device using cryptsetup.

root@nbox:/# cryptsetup -c aes-lrw-benbi:sha256 -s 256 luksFormat /dev/sda1
root@nbox:/# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda1 win
Enter LUKS passphrase:  xxx

Next task is to create filesystem on top of the encrypted device. Choosing one is a tricky proposition. Refer here for some good filesystem comparisons. Based on these recommendations, I chose XFS. XFS has lot of options which can be tweaked as described in the article : Tuning Journaling filesystems.

root@nbox:/# mkfs.xfs  -l size=32768b /dev/mapper/win
meta-data=/dev/mapper/win        isize=256    agcount=4, agsize=1919702 blks
         =                       sectsz=512   attr=2
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=7678805, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096 
log      =internal log           bsize=4096   blocks=32768, version=2
         =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none                   extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0
root@nbox:/# mount -t xfs -o noatime /dev/mapper/win /win

Done. Now store all your  *.vmdk on /win and you have optimized/encrypted filesystem.

PS: I don't have any benchmarks to claim that this is most optimized setup.