Difference between virtio and virtio single controller types?

[WvdW]

Hi,

I can't seem to find any documentation detailing the difference between the virtio and the virtio single scsi controller types for KVM VMs. Has anybody got a link or can perhaps briefly explain when you would use the one or the other?

Thanks.

Werner

 

[sdinet]

VIRTio is synthetic adapter, much faster than software designed to behave like hardware.

 

[manu]

More exactly virtio-scsi appears to the emulated guest as a standard scsci controller, so every SCSI command ( think:discard ) works there to.
Disk will appear like normal disks under a Linux guest /dev/sda,b,c

virtio controller is a special controller of its own kind and disks will appear as /dev/vda,b,c

Both of them should give you similar performances.

 

[BloodyIron]

I want to point out that neither of these responses actually talks about the difference between:

1. "VirtIO SCSI" and
2. "VirtIO SCSI single"

I can't find any documentation myself just yet either, so knowing what exactly the differences are would be important to us admins. Can we get these things documented somewhere please?

 

[dietmar]

The 'single' variant can starts an extra IO thread per disk, so this can sometimes give better performance.

 

[spirit]

virtio-scsi-single is required to enable iothread. (and multiqueues in the future).

with virtio-scsi-single, you have 1 virtio-scsi controller by scsi disk.
virtio-scsi classic, you have all scsi disk on same virtio-scsi controller.

 

[gkovacs]

The 'single' variant can starts an extra IO thread per disk, so this can sometimes give better performance.

virtio-scsi-single is required to enable iothread. (and multiqueues in the future).

with virtio-scsi-single, you have 1 virtio-scsi controller by scsi disk.
virtio-scsi classic, you have all scsi disk on same virtio-scsi controller.

So I need to select VirtIO SCSI single in Options, and also enable IO Thread for every disk in Hardware to ensure iothread is working?

Is there any other limitation (cache type, etc.) for iothread? Right now my VM is on zfs-local, with cache=writeback.

Is there any reliable way to verify that iothread is working?

 

[mir]

So I need to select VirtIO SCSI single in Options, and also enable IO Thread for every disk in Hardware to ensure iothread is working?

Is there any other limitation (cache type, etc.) for iothread? Right now my VM is on zfs-local, with cache=writeback.

Is there any reliable way to verify that iothread is working?

A bug currently breaks life snapshots when iothread is enabled.

 

[gkovacs]

A bug currently breaks life snapshots when iothread is enabled.

Does that mean that vzdump won't be able to take live backups of my VM that's stored on ZFS?

 

[mir]

No, it means you will not be able to rollback a life snapshot (starting old snapshot crashes qemu)

 

[spirit]

So I need to select VirtIO SCSI single in Options, and also enable IO Thread for every disk in Hardware to ensure iothread is working?

Is there any other limitation (cache type, etc.) for iothread? Right now my VM is on zfs-local, with cache=writeback.

Is there any reliable way to verify that iothread is working?

your don't need to enable iothread on all disk. each disk can have his own iothread.
if you don't check iothread, the disk use the main qemu thread.

 

[spirit]

Does that mean that vzdump won't be able to take live backups of my VM that's stored on ZFS?

proxmox live backup don't work currently with iothread.

 

[spirit]

No, it means you will not be able to rollback a life snapshot (starting old snapshot crashes qemu)

Hi mir, I'm not aware of this bug.
The rollback is done on storage when vm is shutdown, so iothread should not impact it.
They was a bug for taking snapshot some week ago, but it should be fixed now.

 

[mir]

Hi mir, I'm not aware of this bug.
The rollback is done on storage when vm is shutdown, so iothread should not impact it.
They was a bug for taking snapshot some week ago, but it should be fixed now.

The bug was due to memory corruption so when rolling back qemu crashed. You say it is fixed, but is this fix in enterprise repo?

 

[BloodyIron]

Neat info! Could we get the wiki updated to reflect this info?

If you want I could help with such things occasionally?

 

[manu]

@BloodyIron: did you open an account on the wiki ?

 

[BloodyIron]

Not yet, is there any vetting process?

 

[gkovacs]

proxmox live backup don't work currently with iothread.

@dietmar @fabian is this true?
what is supposed to happen, does the backup stop with an error?

 

[manu]

@BloodyIron: yes

sent a short email referecing this thread to office at proxmox com and ask for an account
wiki is currently invite only due to spam abuse

 

[fabian]

@dietmar @fabian is this true?
what is supposed to happen, does the backup stop with an error?

the VM configuration is checked at the beginning of the backup and an error message is returned if iothreads are enabled on any of the disks that should be included in the backup.