Should I use passthrough or iSCSI attached to the guest for storage?
The decision depends on what features you need to expose to the guest. In the passthrough case the drive will show up without knowledge of the underlying LUN. Educated guess: If you are looking for raw performance passthough will give you the best result. Reason: When doing IO from the guest using passthough you traverse the guest storage stack + disk stack in the root. When doing iSCSI you traverse the storage + networking stack in the guest + root networking stack Q: Is there a simple way to disable the hypervisor to run some baseline tests on the native system. A: Yes. “bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off” and reboot the server. You should also consider changing the protocols on the root network device to re-enable IP and turn off the “Microsoft Virtual Network Switch Protocol”. See the following for more details (XXX – coming to my blog soon J). For starters turning off the Hypervisor should be enough for testing native performance. To turn it back on do “bcdedit /set hypervisorl
