Hi all
I have a plain proxmox 1.5 install using the 2.6.24-10-pve kernel. I have installed a couple of Windows 7 virtual machines by just following the defaults using the default network (rtl8139) and hard disk (IDE) drivers. I have also assigned it 2048MB RAM and a 64GB (raw) disk.
There are two of these virtual machines running.
The physical box is a Xeon 3350 with 8GBRAM:
pveperf:
and hdparm -tT /dev/sda:
Not the biggest and fastest box, sure, but pretty decent.
The problem is that disk IO is terrible within the virtual machine. I am running Windows XP in VMWare Fusion on my MAC *laptop* which performs significantly faster in terms of disk IO.
The main application I am running is a SQL transformer which reads in one row from DB1, mutates it and sticks it in DB2 (both DBs are on the same virtual machine as the transforming Java process). So lots and lots of little reads and writes.
(I know about optimising DBs and connections)
So, my question - do any of you have any real world experience of improving disk IO for windows guests? For example:
- does using the new kernel make any difference (no containers here, only KVM)
- is qcow2 faster *and stable*
- do the virtio drivers make any different and *are they stable*
- would using an LVM device directly (instead of a file on an LVM device) improve things
- is there anything I can do in the guest itself to speed things up?
I am deliberately not giving any figures (like unzipping an X MB file takes Y seconds, or probably minutes ) other than the comparison to running VMWare Fusion on a laptop.
Many thanks all
I have a plain proxmox 1.5 install using the 2.6.24-10-pve kernel. I have installed a couple of Windows 7 virtual machines by just following the defaults using the default network (rtl8139) and hard disk (IDE) drivers. I have also assigned it 2048MB RAM and a 64GB (raw) disk.
There are two of these virtual machines running.
The physical box is a Xeon 3350 with 8GBRAM:
pveperf:
Code:
CPU BOGOMIPS: 22537.28
REGEX/SECOND: 884055
HD SIZE: 19.38 GB (/dev/md1)
BUFFERED READS: 62.26 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 22.92 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 409.48
DNS EXT: 59.63 ms
DNS INT: 14.01 ms (qfijonah.com)
and hdparm -tT /dev/sda:
Code:
/dev/sda:
Timing cached reads: 9454 MB in 2.00 seconds = 4729.96 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 200 MB in 3.02 seconds = 66.26 MB/sec
Not the biggest and fastest box, sure, but pretty decent.
The problem is that disk IO is terrible within the virtual machine. I am running Windows XP in VMWare Fusion on my MAC *laptop* which performs significantly faster in terms of disk IO.
The main application I am running is a SQL transformer which reads in one row from DB1, mutates it and sticks it in DB2 (both DBs are on the same virtual machine as the transforming Java process). So lots and lots of little reads and writes.
(I know about optimising DBs and connections)
So, my question - do any of you have any real world experience of improving disk IO for windows guests? For example:
- does using the new kernel make any difference (no containers here, only KVM)
- is qcow2 faster *and stable*
- do the virtio drivers make any different and *are they stable*
- would using an LVM device directly (instead of a file on an LVM device) improve things
- is there anything I can do in the guest itself to speed things up?
I am deliberately not giving any figures (like unzipping an X MB file takes Y seconds, or probably minutes ) other than the comparison to running VMWare Fusion on a laptop.
Many thanks all