Way to save/load VM state to an alternative HDD for faster loading?

[tomwg123]

I have a 64GB SSD drive for my OS, but because of the limited space, I put my virtual machine on a regular style HDD filesystem. I'm wondering if I could benefit from an improved config. With my testing environment, I would like the ability to quickly load the VM to a specific state. I don't care if changes aren't persisted after power down.

One option I wondered about was if it would be possible to have a VM's state saved (like when going into a suspended state) to a HDD different from the one that the VM folder exists on. I would want to use it like a snapshot though where I could keep reusing that saved state file each time I power up the VM.

Anyone know if that's possible, or have any other suggestions?

Thanks.

[admin]

If you go to VM > Settings > Options > General, you can change the VM's working directory, which will control where the suspend state gets stored. Note that if you take snapshots, those will be saved to that location as well.

If you want the VM to always start off in the same state, one thing you could do would be to configure the VM to use non-persistent disks.

[mark_l_zhang]

I did not do the test yet.

But snapshot depends on some base. Just like a tree. You can take the snapshot at any leaves. So it is a tree structure. Remember, tree, not forest. All the configurations are stored in the file head. So if you can put the base on the harddisk and save the states in the removal storage, it should work.

[tomwg123]

That fact with snapshots bummed me out. My original setup was with my VM directories on my SSD drive. During VM creation I made the HDD's so they were in a folder on my large drive. After I found out there was no way (that I could find) to save the snapshots to an alternate location, I had to rearrange things.

I also got bummed out with the fact that the virtual HDD can't be set to non-persist mode once a snapshot exists. For software testing I like to have snapshots at various points, such as at different service pack levels.

I guess my setup right now bypassing the SSD drive is fine. I probably shouldn't put that much time into this, but I do wonder if maybe the vmx file format could allow for a more flexible setup that would utilize my SSD w/ minimal space usage (runtime data only). Not that big of a deal, but it could save time for cases where I frequently have to restart at a known state.

[admin]

You perhaps could take your snapshots and then change the working directory so that your suspend state gets stored elsewhere. If you then ever needed to take new snapshots, you could temporarily change the working directory back to the VM's directory.