Workstation pass Windows 7 ATA TRIM commands for SSDs to Win7 host OS?

[Iridium130m]

Does anybody know if Workstation will pass through guest os ATA TRIM commands to support guest OS's (win7 guest running win7 host in my case with an OCZ vertex SSD), or if its even possible to set this up some way?

Might be a good future feature if it doesn't as SSDs become more prevelant...I'm avoiding running vms on an SSD until I see this support.

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

No it will not as the guest OS is totally unaware of the disk system used in the host OS.

In all honesty that is a good thing as it means you can take your VM and move it to another host without any problems.

Will workstation support this in the future by having the host OS add the wanted trim commands?

I'm not sure if it is possible even to do that and VMware doesn't comment on what is or is not on the design table, so I doubt you'll get that question answered.

What's the use case for you wanting to have the trim command supported? Save the life span of your SSD? Even without trim its going to have a MTBF that's larger as your normal SATA/IDE drives.

--

Wil

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[Iridium130m]

<edit, double post>

[Iridium130m]

The purpose of TRIM is to tell the hardware which block are no longer utilized so it can free it up for future use...helps with performance and wear leveling since the SSD controller depends upon have lots of free space to allocate writes out.

Thinking future though, the TRIM command could be intercepted by the workstation (or ESX for that matter) on normal disk, and free up blocks not used any more on thin disk...think an automatic or higher speed shrink process. We wouldn't have to wait for the wiper process to wipe the free blocks in the guest os before the shrink process kicks in.