How to partition disks for best Vmware performance?
 

The plan is to run Xubuntu 8.04 64 as a Host OS in VMware. From within Host I will run vmware workstation with several guest os.
I have played around with vmware now for a while and I decided to loose my dual boot and run vmware.
During testing vmware I have come to that for best performance I will run a slim but still user friendly host so I chose xubuntu.
My plan was to have host os running from raid 0 with 2 disks preferable using the onboard raid adapter. Well that part did not work out for me so I guess software raid it is.

My overall goal is to have best possible performance within the limitations of the hardware I have. No room for buying raid controller card or extra disks at the moment.

If all this seems too much to answer pls help me eve with one Q or any links/articles on the subject

1: What should I do when partitoning the drives, how many partitions should I choose and from which physical disk? swap, /root, /home, /usr was the plan. should I also have /var?
2: How can I best utilize the disks, as I have 5 disks and I will use 4 of them. I would not have ie winxp use all space within a 500 GB drive, but say max 50 GB. How can I set it up so I can use the free diskspace?
3: Could I take a given amount of all 4 drives to make up a raid 0 array, and will doing so actually give me max performance? (hw raid 0 gives better performance when adding additional drives is it also true for sw raid?)
4: If I could use space from all 4 drives for raid 0 array what partitions should I have running from that raid 0 array?
5: What filesystem should I choose for the different partitions? ie my /home directory will hold both smaller files but also music+movies collection. XFS, JFS or ReiserFS?
6: Does the choice of filesystem and partition play a big part when it comes to overall performance today? Reading articles on the net it seems people are divided on this.
7: Can I set up boot from say a part of the winxp drive and then have xubuntu (host os) installed in raid 0, or best of all force linux to boot from a raid 0?
8: When installing apps and software from package manager synaptic, can i make sure everything is installed in /home?
9: If this was a pure windows box i would use raid 0 to install windows, and have all files/data on a separate drive.
Am i thinking correctly here when I will try to use 2 disks in raid 0 for the xubuntu+vmware? I'll guess most of the reading/writing of disks will take place from host xubuntu?

My system:
Intel Q6600
8 GB Ram
Asus P5N E SLI [Limitied to 4 x Sata]
2 x Cuda 750 ES 2
2 x Cuda 500 ES 2
1 x Caviar 750
Bios version 801
OS Xubuntu 8.04 64 Bit

Hopefully someone can push me in the right directin here.

Not sure if you are saying you want to dualboot or not.

Anyway, rule of thumb is:

1. keep the host OS simple...I don't remember if you need space for temp files used by VMWare workstation in /var...doesn't hurt to have it on its own partition anyway
2. you can use mdadm to create striped drives from equal size partitions on each of the 4 drives. Use that for VM storage.
3. Don't use software raid other than raid 1 for root partition. Makes troubleshooting a PITA if something goes wrong
4. for your first time off, just stick to ext3. XFS/JFS requires good understanding of how journaling works and storage fundamentals to get the best performance out of them. Besides, your stuck with 4k pages anyway on linux.

Hope this helps.

Thx.
No I do not want dualboot no more.

So I put host os on a singel drive with no raid. hda. I'll just go for ext3 then for now at least.
Then I can put the guests on a raid 0 made up from 2 disks. I've been told to try to put /temp on a different disk then the vmware storage due to performance, so i can put /temp on the 4th disk.

1: Whatabout /root? Where should I put /root and how big should it be?

2: What about /home, I'll guess this used for vmware storage?

Guess I messed things up here
 

Ok now I can not log in.
The partitioning went ok so did the installation. After reboot I could not log in. I had set up /home on the raid 0.
I might have messed up with primary/logical partitions. The only thing I can think of is that I have put more primary partitions then what the system will allow.

I can run terminal when logged in as root so I might be able to change this from gparted?