Our purpose in this chapter has been to understand virtual disks in the context of Proxmox VE virtual machine guests (the chapter does not address anything that concerns container guests).

We've accomplished a difficult task by focusing on how Proxmox VE, and its underlying virtualization technology, handle the abstractions of the components of physical hard disk drives: storage media, the bus interface, and the disk buffer.

As we proceeded, we worked hard to understand and be able to articulate how the choices we make when determining disk format, bus, and disk buffer preferences can significantly affect both features and I/O performance.

At the most fundamental level, we recognized that our VMs will not have better I/O proficiency than our physical host's hardware allows. However, you also learned that, by relying on paravirtualization drivers, you can minimize the overhead cost of virtualization on I/O performance.

To summarize, you learned that our decision making regarding virtual...