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I setup KVM following the guide here:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/centos-rhel-linux-kvm-virtulization-tutorial/

I setup a bridged network and it worked fine except that the transfer speed is 200KB/s instead of the gigabit speed that I get on the host machine by itself.

I tried editing the guest network settings to set "model=virtio"

http://wiki.libvirt.org/page/Virtio

but this just moves ifconfig-eth0 to ifconfig-eth0.bak in the VM and networking doesn't work at all. I tried moving ifconfig-eth0 back and starting up eth0, which works, but now the transfer speed is ~ 60KB/s

I have no idea what else to try. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

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  • 200 KB/s is very poor, which CentOS and KVM version are you running? Oct 16, 2011 at 18:16

3 Answers 3

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I think you must configure iptables to allow all traffic to be forwarded across the bridge:

$ sudo iptables -I FORWARD -m physdev --physdev-is-bridged -j ACCEPT
$ sudo service iptables save
$ sudo service iptables restart

and prevent bridged traffic from being processed by iptables rules, this improves the bridge’s performance. In /etc/sysctl.conf append the following lines:

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 0
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 0

then reload the kernel parameters configured with sysctl:

$ sudo sysctl -p /etc/sysctl.conf

and restart the libvirt daemon.

$ sudo service libvirtd reload

you can find more here Bridged networking with libvirt and I describe here the full process of How to install KVM and libvirt on CentOS 6.2 with bridged networking

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virtio will typically get you the best performance, but some hardware doesn't work well with it -- try switching model to e1000 (assuming a gigabit NIC from what you've said) and see if it works better.

EDIT: What does your bridging configuration on the host look like? I'm familiar with doing this on the Debian/Ubuntu side of things rather than RH/CentOS, but a typical /etc/network/interfaces setup for us would look like this:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

auto eth0
iface eth0 inet manual

auto br0
iface br0 inet static
    address 192.168.0.2
    netmask 255.255.255.0
    network 192.168.0.0
    broadcast 192.168.0.255
    gateway 192.168.0.1
    bridge_ports eth0
    bridge_stp off
    bridge_maxage 12
    bridge_fd 9
    bridge_hello 2

Also, are your guests fully virtualized (can ensure with --hvm switch in libvirt)?

Lastly, if you have a different NIC kicking around that you can install to experiment with you might install it to see if it makes a difference. If not, you might want to pick one up -- we've had good luck with the relatively cheap Intel desktop gigabit NICs.

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  • e1000 runs at the same speed as virtio. are there any other model numbers i can try?
    – dan
    Sep 21, 2010 at 18:55
  • just tried rstl8139 also. same low network speed.
    – dan
    Sep 21, 2010 at 19:03
  • See additions to answer above.
    – nedm
    Sep 22, 2010 at 17:36
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Using virtio will provide the better speeds. Which version are you running exactly?

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