Okay, so before I delve into this, I'd like to point out that the real applications to a concept like this are fairly limited, so please don't just respond with "Why do you need this?" I'll tell you the answer right now: I don't. BUT, someone else might.
So if you have even a little bit of financial resources able to be dedicated to IT, one of the easiest and maybe most beneficial things you can upgrade is RAM, especially in the realm of virtualization where you have many guests operating systems doing whatever they're doing without regard of the tax it's putting on the hardware.
With this abundance of RAM we often find ourselves with, sometimes we end up asking silly questions. Here is one such question:
Is it possible to run a complete QEMU VM on a virtual hard drive that actually exists in the host server's RAM? I mean, with tmpFS, we know that we can host basic files in RAM, but can we act as if a segment of allocated RAM is a block storage device for a virtual machine to boot from?
There are obvious downsides: You'd need to re-upload the OS to memory whenever you wanted to boot the VM, and any power outages would completely wipe any data that hadn't been backed up.
But possible upsides include optimizing certain workloads that require fast database lookups without needing to tinker with the software on the VM, and uh... well, it's cool?
I guess what I'm looking for can be seen as preemptive disk-caching to the extreme. Does any such system exist? How would you implement it?
So if you have even a little bit of financial resources able to be dedicated to IT, one of the easiest and maybe most beneficial things you can upgrade is RAM, especially in the realm of virtualization where you have many guests operating systems doing whatever they're doing without regard of the tax it's putting on the hardware.
With this abundance of RAM we often find ourselves with, sometimes we end up asking silly questions. Here is one such question:
Is it possible to run a complete QEMU VM on a virtual hard drive that actually exists in the host server's RAM? I mean, with tmpFS, we know that we can host basic files in RAM, but can we act as if a segment of allocated RAM is a block storage device for a virtual machine to boot from?
There are obvious downsides: You'd need to re-upload the OS to memory whenever you wanted to boot the VM, and any power outages would completely wipe any data that hadn't been backed up.
But possible upsides include optimizing certain workloads that require fast database lookups without needing to tinker with the software on the VM, and uh... well, it's cool?
I guess what I'm looking for can be seen as preemptive disk-caching to the extreme. Does any such system exist? How would you implement it?
