I have read a lot of information on using SSD drives in virtualization environment and the possible problems with not supported TRIM command. I fully understand what the TRIM is, what the problems with passing TRIM down to the drive are and so on.
What I didn't find is clear answer on the question: "is there any way to use SSD drive in guest OS without affecting its performance (associated with lack of the TRIM command)".
For example.. is the solution to connect the SSD drive in RAW mode to the guest machine? If not, why? Are there any other harder to implement options just to "make it right".
Best Answer
I currently run VM Workstation 8 on a set of 3 OCZ Vertex 3 240 Max IOP SSDs in a RAID 0 set. Performance is great. Since there is no TRIM in RAID I just leave about 100Gb unused so that garbage collection can still take place. Lack of TRIM has never been a factor and I'm running about 8 servers including an iSCSI server. With iSCSI I just serve up disk images and the performance is super. Clustering is very doable, even on a good laptop. Running VMware ESXi is also very doable. SSD makes it happen.