Virtio with newest Fedora 1-52 with Vista64

[mmidgett]

I have been working with trying to solve some performance issues with windows vista 64 bit. This was a ESXI VM image that I converted to qcow2. I had already been running the E1000 nic driver so just to get the VM back up and running I setup the new VM with the E1000 nic and the drive as sata. While this worked it didn't seem to do the trick. Well I noticed that the fedora project release a new VirtIO driver so I thought I'd try it as I knew the VirtIO driver would work better. After mounting the ISO I was supprised to find that the Vista 64 has no storage drivers. The VirtIO nic made a huge increase in network speed. From 600mbit to 919mbit using Iperf. Inter host transport now reads 10Gbits so thats nice. I tried to use the driver from the R2008 but it cause my system not to boot.

Why do you think that they didn't package the drivers? I would love to get my disk speed up also. Just doing a crude test I can copy from a client computer about 3 times faster to a debian samba mount than the windows and I know its due to not being able to use the VirtIO storage.

 

[mir]

It is in my image. Folder name VISTA->AMD64

 

[mmidgett]

I just checked and there was only NetKVM in Vista > AMD64

http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/virtio-win-0.1-52.iso

Someone tell me I'm not missing something.

 

[Milkwyrm]

They're in the WLH folder.. for "Windows Long Horn" Vista's code name pre release.
the XP 64bits ones on the other hand do seem to be missing.

 

[mmenaz]

Have a look at:
http://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Paravirtualized_Network_Drivers_for_Windows

 

[mmidgett]

Not exactly stellar performance but copying a 800mb folder doing the windows copy paste went from 4ish mb/s to 16mb/s so the virtIO storage driver seems to have worked. I had taken a snap shot so I was able to roll back. The first time install I let windows load the correct driver <--- Mistake. The second time I used the legacy hardware installer from the device manager to install the virtstor driver and I used Redhat VirtIO Controller. It listed two hardware devices using that driver. The other was a passthrough driver and I wasn't sure if I should be using that. Anyways all is much better now. Also HD tune reports an average of 80mb/s during its test with the highest spike at 582mb/s this is using a qcow2 file on a raid 10 software store with 4 x 500GB WD blacks sata 6gb with 32mb cache.