Comment by lotharcable

> So if I understand correctly, you're suggesting that in essence the VM lied to Windows to improve performance?

Pretty much. Just speculating because I don't know how your systems was configured back in the day.

But all of what I said applies to most VM solutions.

If you are dealing with enterprise-grade hardware it isn't a bad things. Keep in mind that typically OSes are going to assume that they are the only things operating on storage. So if you have like 30 windows boxes all trying to write to shared disk at the same time it can lead to some bad behavior if you are not using a write cache.

The system has battery backup and typically they expect you to use shared SAN or NAS with multipath and/or bonded network interfaces for redundancy as well as having backups. So the chances of data loss is a lot less then typical consumer hardware and it gives the hosting OS better chances at optimizing and scheduling writes properly.

Also remember the guest OS still has the option to send a 'flush' command to disk, which would ensure the writes complete regardless.

> It's been many years, but I don't imagine I would have chosen an option like that. I am very surprised VMWare would default to such behavior.

This is pretty normal. You'll see the same sort of options with hardware RAID devices and such things with their own internal battery-backed cache.