We’re looking to move most of our servers into VMWare so that we can easily back up the entire system and restore it in case of hardware failure. We’ve moved our Jabber server and now buzilla into VMWare and the next most likely candidate is our Subversion server. I’m wondering if it makes sense to store large amounts of data in the VM directly or if we should look at putting the actual data store on the host machine, but all the configuration stuff in the VM.

Should I just not worry about it and put it all in the VM or is there a benefit to avoiding the extra file system layer that the VM disk image adds? I wouldn’t expect performance to be a problem, it’s reliability I’m concerned with.

Obviously in either case we should be backing up the actual data separately to the disk image in case the disk image has subtle corruption problems.