Avanti allows simultaneous access against up to 45 virtual disks (FreeAXP supports seven disks).  These disks can all exist as container files on a single physical disk on the host system.  If an application running under Avanti puts high I/O loads on multiple virtual Alpha disks, the host system physical disk controller can be saturated, which in turn will adversely impact performance on Avanti and the host system.  To alleviate this problem, spread virtual disks across multiple physical disks and controllers.

Note:Virtual disks that are hosted on a RAID controller should not have this issue.