Home / ubuntu / Questions / 116135
Accepted
yossile
Asked: 2012-03-27 05:16:20 +0800 CST

How can I limit disk access bandwidth for a Virtual Machine guest?

  • 772

I have a Virtualbox on my Ubuntu (host) that serves few Windows guest OS.
Sometimes the running Windows virtual machine starts massive access to the disk which blocks me in my host environment. I would like to limit the read/write of data access to the physical harddisk.

How can I do it?

virtualbox virtualization disk-usage

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Starting from version 4.0 we are able to limit Virtual Box bandwith for acess to disk images (see Virtual Box Manual for details)

    We need to create a bandwith group first (in the example below named "Limit" for 20 MB/s):

    VBoxManage bandwidthctl "VM name" add Limit --type disk --limit 20M
VBoxManage storageattach "VM name" --storagectl "SATA" --port 0 --device 0 --type hdd
                                   --medium disk1.vdi --bandwidthgroup Limit
VBoxManage storageattach "VM name" --storagectl "SATA" --port 1 --device 0 --type hdd
                                   --medium disk2.vdi --bandwidthgroup Limit

    If you get this error:

    VBoxManage: error: Cannot register the hard disk '.../foo.vdi' {...} because a hard disk '.../foo.vdi' with UUID {...} already exists

    then replace the path to the disk image with the UUID given in the error (both should be the same) including the {}

    To further limit disk access to 10 MB/s we can then issue

    VBoxManage bandwidthctl "VM name" set Limit --limit 10M

    This can even be done during runtime.

    • 11