Hi all,
slightly 'silly' question possibly, but I wanted to ask in case anyone has seen this / or has comments / thoughts.
I just picked up management of a small group of 3 ProxVE hosts. Basic hardware specs,
- single-socket quadcore intel ~2.8ghz xeon, 4 gigs memory
- raid10 SATA 4x1tb disks on a 3ware raid 9650se type card (approx)
- machine was originally setup as Raid5 I think, but performance concerns led original installer to re-install onto a raid 10 config.
- pveperf stats look OK (see below if you wish)
There are presently 2 x KVM single-cpu Win2003 VM's running on this host. When originally installed, they were enbled as 2-cpu SMP VM's. My understanding is that KVM and SMP with Windows VM's is not a reliable combination (maybe this has changed though?) so I moved down from 2 to 1 cpu on the KVM VM config.
The VMs were installed with "Full Hard Drive Filesystem Encryption" provided by "TrueCrypt". In particular this means when the VM is powered on, a passphrase must be provided to boot the system / for access to the encrypted filesystem. This appears to work fine / in the same manner as for truecrypt on a physical host.
However, these VMs have had 'performance issues' since initial deployment (apparently). These 'issues' apparently became 'less bad' when re-installed from Raid5 to Raid10 config on the HW raid controller. I can't comment on performance in the 'before' config specifically since I never saw / touched this config. I first worked with the machines last night. My observations were,
- I've never seen KVM Win2003 VM's boot so slowly: One of the VMs spends about 20 minutes to get from power-on through to the "Log In" prompt for windows. The other VM varied a bit, sometimes as fast (!hah!) as 8-10 minutes, sometimes as slow as 15-20 minutes.
- general performance once booted for the VMs is 'tolerable' but 'sluggish' compared to my normal 'subjective user experience' when managing such a machine on the console or via RDP admin desktop session.
- from what I can tell, both VMs were stock installs of Win2003 Enterprise 32bit edition, each has 2gigs RAM allocated (although I understand originally at least one was configured with 3 gigs ram, maybe only one VM running at a time on the physical host?)
- I have setup other Win2003 KVM based VMs on different hosts but running similar hardware (single-socket similar vintage quadcore intel CPU, same 3ware raid sata config, or even 'slower' disk config - 2 drives in raid1 mirror, rather than raid10 with 4 drives) -- and I have never seen subjective VM performance this poor. Typical boot time for Win2003 VMs in my experience is ~1 minute or less on this sort of config. But this has always been with vanilla installs (no truecrypt encryption)
I'm just wondering, if any of this sounds in any way familiar to anyone, ie,
- any red flags here for problems on the KVM VM performance ?
- any known issues with TrueCrypt running inside KVM VMs ?
- anything else springs to mind ?
the VMs are 'functional' as they stand right now, but certainly / IMHO - they are marginal, and certainly a hassle each time they are rebooted to have such a delay before the machine is usable.
Any thoughts / comments are certainly most welcome.
Tim
-----PVE PERF STATS - ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE------
clinicPVM3:~# pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS: 21283.49
REGEX/SECOND: 832574
HD SIZE: 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: 105.13 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 9.21 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 2719.96
DNS EXT: 4016.44 ms
DNS INT: 0.64 ms (box01.local)
-note that all 3 hosts have similar pveperf stats
-note that DNS is borked right now at this site for external name resolution due to issues beyond my control (joy) - hence the terrible DNS_EXT reporting time.
slightly 'silly' question possibly, but I wanted to ask in case anyone has seen this / or has comments / thoughts.
I just picked up management of a small group of 3 ProxVE hosts. Basic hardware specs,
- single-socket quadcore intel ~2.8ghz xeon, 4 gigs memory
- raid10 SATA 4x1tb disks on a 3ware raid 9650se type card (approx)
- machine was originally setup as Raid5 I think, but performance concerns led original installer to re-install onto a raid 10 config.
- pveperf stats look OK (see below if you wish)
There are presently 2 x KVM single-cpu Win2003 VM's running on this host. When originally installed, they were enbled as 2-cpu SMP VM's. My understanding is that KVM and SMP with Windows VM's is not a reliable combination (maybe this has changed though?) so I moved down from 2 to 1 cpu on the KVM VM config.
The VMs were installed with "Full Hard Drive Filesystem Encryption" provided by "TrueCrypt". In particular this means when the VM is powered on, a passphrase must be provided to boot the system / for access to the encrypted filesystem. This appears to work fine / in the same manner as for truecrypt on a physical host.
However, these VMs have had 'performance issues' since initial deployment (apparently). These 'issues' apparently became 'less bad' when re-installed from Raid5 to Raid10 config on the HW raid controller. I can't comment on performance in the 'before' config specifically since I never saw / touched this config. I first worked with the machines last night. My observations were,
- I've never seen KVM Win2003 VM's boot so slowly: One of the VMs spends about 20 minutes to get from power-on through to the "Log In" prompt for windows. The other VM varied a bit, sometimes as fast (!hah!) as 8-10 minutes, sometimes as slow as 15-20 minutes.
- general performance once booted for the VMs is 'tolerable' but 'sluggish' compared to my normal 'subjective user experience' when managing such a machine on the console or via RDP admin desktop session.
- from what I can tell, both VMs were stock installs of Win2003 Enterprise 32bit edition, each has 2gigs RAM allocated (although I understand originally at least one was configured with 3 gigs ram, maybe only one VM running at a time on the physical host?)
- I have setup other Win2003 KVM based VMs on different hosts but running similar hardware (single-socket similar vintage quadcore intel CPU, same 3ware raid sata config, or even 'slower' disk config - 2 drives in raid1 mirror, rather than raid10 with 4 drives) -- and I have never seen subjective VM performance this poor. Typical boot time for Win2003 VMs in my experience is ~1 minute or less on this sort of config. But this has always been with vanilla installs (no truecrypt encryption)
I'm just wondering, if any of this sounds in any way familiar to anyone, ie,
- any red flags here for problems on the KVM VM performance ?
- any known issues with TrueCrypt running inside KVM VMs ?
- anything else springs to mind ?
the VMs are 'functional' as they stand right now, but certainly / IMHO - they are marginal, and certainly a hassle each time they are rebooted to have such a delay before the machine is usable.
Any thoughts / comments are certainly most welcome.
Tim
-----PVE PERF STATS - ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE------
clinicPVM3:~# pveperf
CPU BOGOMIPS: 21283.49
REGEX/SECOND: 832574
HD SIZE: 94.49 GB (/dev/pve/root)
BUFFERED READS: 105.13 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 9.21 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND: 2719.96
DNS EXT: 4016.44 ms
DNS INT: 0.64 ms (box01.local)
-note that all 3 hosts have similar pveperf stats
-note that DNS is borked right now at this site for external name resolution due to issues beyond my control (joy) - hence the terrible DNS_EXT reporting time.
D:70:09:67