There are lots of tools for creating RAM drives. None of them seem to work for windows 2008 R2. Does anyone know if this is possible and if so how. Does anyone know of a tool that does work?
I've tried the gavotte ram disk. It doesn't work. When i try to install it it just sais "Failed". I don't see log files anywhere. I've tried a couple of other ones (forgot the names) to no avail.
Any ideas?
Thanks
We currently use AR Soft RAM Disk on some Windows 2003 servers for storing short lived temporary files.
Looking forward to a move to 64-bit Windows Server 2008 I'm wondering what options there are for a RAM disk since it appears AR Soft RAM Disk was discontinued in 2005.
I'm not looking for any physical disk backing, just a pure RAM disk that appears like a normal drive to Windows.
Does anyone have any experience with RAM disks on Windows Server 2008, especially for 64-bit?
Currently I'm using ESX (v3 and v4) to test a scripted OS (Windows 2003) and application install DVD. The DVD ISO (8GB) is mounted on a 1Gbps NFS datastore and the VMDK's (20GB) are on an SSD mounted via NFS over a 10Gbps link.
It still takes a lot longer than I'd really like for to run through a test iteration and I'm wondering if mounting the virtual disks and ISO on a RAM disk on the same server as the hypervisor is running on would be worth my while. I can dedicate a server to this VM and 32GB of RAM in the system should be adequate to do the trick I'd guess. (1GB hypervisor OS, 28GB RAM disk and 2GB for the VM is < the 32GB available to me)
Since hosting a RAM disk within ESX does not seem possible I'm open to trying KVM/Xen/Hyper-V. KVM would probably be my first choice of these three.
Anyone out there tried this? Bear in mind this is purely for a test run of the installer, the VM will be discarded as soon as the test is completed so I'm not worried about losing data from the remote possibility of a power failure.
Just wondering, have you ever made anything useful with a RAM disk in production? I wonder if the performance benefit they afford possibly outweighs their temporary nature in a specific circumstance.
I've only ever used one once, and it wasn't for performance. It was when I needed some writable disk space on a server showing hard drive errors – it gave just enough space for me to install the 3ware RAID utility to identify the dodgy disk.
How have you used a RAM disk in production?
Per GB prices of rapid SSD (like Intel X25-E) come close to prices of high-end RAM. So what extra advantages does SSD give you? What are particular reasons, why you buy SSD, instead of just putting more RAM in your server machine, to have it used as HDD cache or even create RAM-disk?
EDIT: of course I'm aware, that SSD are persistent. But so is the data in disk cache. Reading from RAM has got to be a lot faster, then reading from SSD. Also, SSD have slow write times, so no advantage over HDD there. Especially for sequential writes.
EDIT2: amount of RAM you can put is not so limited. With introduction of DDR3, it's not multiple of 2 anymore, it's multiple of 3. Standard SOHO MoBos have 6 slots, while server boards have 12 or even impressive 18 slots, supporting total of 144GB of RAM. Even if you use more cost effective 4GB memory sticks, you still can have 72GB.