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I've a DOM0 packed with two 3TB hard drives configured as a software RAID1, also sporting 16GB of memory. The DOM0's Linux distro is a CentOS 6.3 and the hypervisor is a libvirt-managed KVM.

I'm experiencing performances degradations between the DOM0 and the DOMU, with DOMU write throughput around 40% of the DOM0's. I tested the performances using the following simple dd command:

dd bs=1M count=1024 oflag=direct if=/dev/zero of=testb conv=fdatasync

I configured the DEADLINE elevator for DOM0 and the NOOP one for DOMU, which in turn is a Debian Unstable:

Linux vm1 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun Sep 23 10:07:46 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux

root@vm1:/home/paris# cat /etc/debian_version
6.0.6

As for DOMU configuration in libvirt, here is the XML fragment for one of the virtual drives which are actually plain raw fallocated files:

<disk type='file' device='disk'>
  <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none' io='native'/>
  <source file='/mnt/vmstore2/disks/vm1/boot.img'/>
  <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
  <alias name='virtio-disk0'/>
  <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/>
</disk>

I also noticed that in the command line generated by libvirt, the "if" parameter of the -drive command line switch is set to "none" instead of "virtio":

-drive file=/mnt/vmstore2/disks/vm1/root.img,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk2,format=raw,cache=none,aio=native
-device virtio-blk-pci,scsi=off,bus=pci.0,addr=0x7,drive=drive-virtio-disk2,id=virtio-disk2

I don't know whether this performace degradation is normal, but I read that VIRTIO should be able to guarantee an almost identical throughput between DOM0 and DOMU.

Thank you for any help.

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  • UPDATE. I tried to mount the raw image file on DOM0 and, repeating the test, now the performance degradation raised to 80%.
    – Cristiano Paris
    Jan 11, 2013 at 17:09
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    What is all this about dom0 and domU? You said you were using KVM, not Xen?
    – Michael Hampton
    Jan 11, 2013 at 17:57
  • YEp! I'm coming from Xen and testing KVM. Sorry for that: s/domU/guest/g s/dom0/host/g
    – Cristiano Paris
    Jan 11, 2013 at 18:29

1 Answer 1

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Even with virtio, using an image file for a guest disk is going to have a certain amount of associated overhead. This can vary significantly depending on other I/O activity on the same physical device that the image file resides on.

If you were to pass a physical disk as a block device to KVM guest with the virtio driver, you would see much closer to native throughput. Same goes for a partition or LVM volume, with the same I/O caveats as above (though these will usually both still peform better than a disk image file).

We do use image files as disk for some of our KVM guests, but we keep the images on a separate physical drive or array than the host whenever possible.

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  • If you do need disk images, try preallocating them first. It makes a huge difference.
    – n8whnp
    Jan 11, 2013 at 20:30

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