Running virtual machines from USB keys

[SvenGus]

Recently, I have seen these quite interesting USB flash drives from Kingston:

http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business#dthx30

http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business#DTHXP30

http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/bootable

... which are all high-performance and large-capacity USB flash drives, of which the Windows To Go ones are also bootable, officially for running the Windows 8 Enterprise Windows To Go feature.

Now, say that I would like to store some VMs and run them directly from one of those USB flash drives: would it be better to choose one of the "ordinary" ones, or rather one of the Windows To Go ones, which also have TRIM support and behave more like a real SSD (and also like an internal drive)...?

Ideally, one could maybe also run an "external" Boot Camp-like configuration from the Windows To Go drive, using it both natively (of course with Apple's Boot Camp drivers installed) and from within OS X via Fusion; one could maybe also add a Linux (Ubuntu, or similar) partition to the USB key, thus getting the best of all worlds, without touching the Mac's internal HD/SSD.

Has anyone tested those types of USB keys with virtual machines? Are they good enough from the endurance point of view, for example?

They could be a good option for MacBook Airs and other capacity-limited (from the internal storage point of view) machines, for example.

It would be very interesting to know something more about all this...

[WoodyZ]

If you haven't read Kingston's Flash Memory Guide you should, it a good read.

[SvenGus]

A very interesting read, indeed... :smileycool:

Personally, at the current stage of things (for example, no Apple Boot Camp support for external drives, etc. etc.), I would probably choose one of the blue Hyper-X 3.0 USB flash drives, which have very good specs and "reasonable" prices:

http://www.kingston.com/us/usb/personal_business#dthx30

BTW, I tried to create a Windows To Go drive (with a traditional external USB 3.0 HD) from within a Fusion Windows 8 Enterprise VM, and all went well: but then it didn't work "natively" on two of my Macs (it booted with the 8 logo, configured something, but then only a black screen...), so this still seems to be rather unsupported.

The Hyper-X USB 3.0 keys also have a great look from the design point of view...

The only problem might be total endurance, as they probably are designed as data drives, rather than OS drives (but with 5 years warranty: good!): well, running VMs off of them should be OK, hopefully...

[SvenGus]

Interesting, too - Parallels Desktop 8 allows for running Windows To Go-based VMs:

http://kb.parallels.com/en/115155

... à la Boot Camp VMs.

If a Fusion 5 VM could be booted from USB, this should be possibile also with Fusion: I've also read somewhere that setting firmware = "efi" in the .vmx should allow this; well, I'll try when I have some time...

[SvenGus]

... OK, it works!

Just create a new Fusion Windows 8 VM, similarly to how detailed in the Parallels article above, i.e., without a hard drive; then, edit its .vmx, adding firmware = "efi" to it; finally, attach your WTG drive to a USB port and start the VM, which will drop into an EFI shell (in the meantime, set the WTG drive to always connect to Windows, in the VM's USB settings), and then execute these commands in the EFI shell:

Shell> fs0:

fs0:> \EFI\BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI

(if your WTG is 64-bit), which will finally let the VM boot from the USB (flash) drive, and then configure the OS.

Here all this is explained:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc749064(v=ws.10).aspx

Sadly, you must repeat the EFI shell procedure at every boot, which is quite annoying.

Anyway, WTG USB boot works also in VMware Fusion, and the Tools work, too, once installed: very good!

[SvenGus]

... Ah, I almost forgot: of course, a good feature request would be to make all this available directly through the GUI, as in Parallels; i.e., add also USB in the boot options of the VM settings (and also make it unnecessary to manually edit the configuration file).

Well, thinking again about the Kingston flash drives detailed before, probably the ones specific for WTG have better endurance and are better suited for repeated OS use than the others (but they are also very expensive!), who knows...

Edit: After installing Apple's Boot Camp drivers inside the WTG VM, you can also use the USB drive to boot the Mac natively: thus, in practice, Boot Camp on an external drive.

The problem is that Windows 8 doesn't seem to retain its activation status between virtual and native boot, and between different machines: that's also because Windows To Go has been thought only for corporate environments, where activation is handled differently.

Anyway, interesting to know that in essence it works, except for the activation issues outside corporate environments.