VirtIO Drivers Windows 10

[Moosetracks]

I setup a VM using an original windows 10 iso image. I have used the VirtIO drivers to add the balloon driver.

What other drivers do I need to add to get the best performance out of my windows 10 vm?
Do I need to change my hardware... The hard drive, and network to VirtIO?

 

[Tahsin]

I would change the network to VirtIO and disk drive to VirtIO SCSI Controller with IO Thread enabled. Changing the disk drive to VirtIO SCSI Controller to boot drive will make the system unbootable. Since windows is already installed, i would add extra drive with VirtIO SCSI Controller, load windows and install driver. After that move primary drive to VirtIO SCSI Controller.

 

[Moosetracks]

Thanks for your input. I will try it out.

How would I move the primary drive over to VirtIO once I add the second drive?

Does the virtio setup boost the performance?

I have two NUC's I did a benchmark using an app called novabench. Here are some results I am seeing

Nuc 1 i7-8809G, 970 PRO SSD
WIndows 10 installed (no vm)
CPU score 870
Ram Score 334 (32870 MB/s)
Disk Score 180 (1251 MB/s read 1452 MB/s write)
VM workstation running windows 10 vm on NUC 1
CPU score 300
Ram Score 241 (18289 MB/s)
Disk Score 132 (827 MB/s read 929 MS/s Write)

Nuc 2 i7-6770HQ, 960 PRO SSD
Proxmox
VM 1 (windows 10 regular ISO no vertio)
CPU 353
Ram Score 202 (19289 MB/s)
Disk Score 101 (765 MB/s write 449 Mb/s Read)
VM2 (Windows 10 Vertio configured)
CPU 209
Ram score 202 (19145 Mb/s)
Disk Score 253 (2278 MB/s write 2084 MB/s read)

Is novabench an ok way to check performance? What causes the ram speed to max out so much lower on proxmox vs a windows 10 native install?

 

[AlexLup]

If on Ceph, I would enable write back cache on the VMs disks for performance in KVM.

 

[Moosetracks]

If on Ceph, I would enable write back cache on the VMs disks for performance in KVM.

I have that turned on. I didn't test it without it on.

 

[Tahsin]

Try turning off Ballooning, it should help with performance. As for the changing the drive, I don't remember if you can through GUI but from the conf file you can change it. I will let you know on that soon.

 

[Moosetracks]

What is the advantage of the method you described. Creating a second hard drive and then installing windows on it? Vs installing a fresh copy of windows?

What are you saying to do after you install windows on the new hard drive in vertio mode?

 

[Tahsin]

What is the advantage of the method you described. Creating a second hard drive and then installing windows on it? Vs installing a fresh copy of windows?

What are you saying to do after you install windows on the new hard drive in vertio mode?

Windows does not have drivers for the VirtIO SCSI. There is no generic model of the driver. Windows will either blue screen or will have something like NTDLR not found and will not load.

Adding second drive to install the SCSI driver in Windows. The reason i said to install the second drive is so you can install the driver and not have to redo the windows installation.

 

[Moosetracks]

Tahsin. That worked. I wasn't quite sure what you meant, but it lead me to this post which got it all working...

https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/change-bus-type-ide-to-virtio.28112/

So the steps for me ended up being...
1. Add the virtio-win drivers ISO file to the storage, and add the cd rom to the vm
2. shut down the vm
3. Change the network to virtio
4. Leave the current hard disk alone and add another virtio hard drive
5. Boot the vm and go to device manager and update drivers for the network card, and the new storage
6. Shut down the vm
7. Remove the new hard disk you just added
8. Detach the original IDE hard disk
9. Double click the detached hard disk and re add it as a virtio drive.
10 Go into options and change the boot order from IDE to virtio for the 1st priority

The computer powered up and now all my benchmarks on this machine match one created with the virtio hardware to begin with.
The best performance was with balloon memory turned off, and the hard disk set to writeback cache.

 

[Tahsin]

Glad it worked out for you! If you have enough RAM I would keep ballooning driver turned off. Windows 10 is pretty good with RAM usage.

 

[Moosetracks]

I will thanks I have enough ram to not need to do this for now. Thanks for the help.

 

[techowned5]

I setup a VM using an original windows 10 iso image. I have used the VirtIO drivers to add the balloon driver.

What other drivers do I need to add to get the best performance out of my windows 10 vm?
Do I need to change my hardware... The hard drive, and network to VirtIO?

For hardware change yes, you may add an SSD to speed up the process.