Migrate KVM Disk Access from IDE to Virtio

Posted by digo on March 31, 2011 Leave a comment (2) Go to comments

This article assumes a KVM guest that runs from raw or qcow2 devices using emulated ide access. Since some time now, full virtualisation for block devices is available, facilitating the benefit of paravirtualisation.

Benchmarked in bonnie++, the difference looks like this, revealing a way better performance of virtio:

IDE:

Version  1.96       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
<host>          2G   856  94 33126   7 30392   7  4727  92 739753  70 300.4  20
Latency             51096us    2473ms     972ms    5240us    1516us     382ms
Version  1.96       ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
<host>              -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16    35   0 +++++ +++    46   0    34   0 +++++ +++    44   0
Latency               338ms     808us    2136ms     341ms     155us    2016ms

Virtio:

Version  1.96       ------Sequential Output------ --Sequential Input- --Random-
Concurrency   1     -Per Chr- --Block-- -Rewrite- -Per Chr- --Block-- --Seeks--
Machine        Size K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP K/sec %CP  /sec %CP
<host>          2G   732  91 58767   8 72183  11  4026  94 1477698  80 321.6   9
Latency             16751us    1159ms     492ms    4155us     624us     422ms
Version  1.96       ------Sequential Create------ --------Random Create--------
<host>              -Create-- --Read--- -Delete-- -Create-- --Read--- -Delete--
              files  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP  /sec %CP
                 16    34   0 +++++ +++    46   0    34   0 +++++ +++    45   0
Latency               240ms     790us    1502ms     296ms     167us    1450ms

So in order to make the switch from from ide to virtio, the following steps need to be taken:

Run virsh edit <your_vm_name>. From there, edit the config file and adjust all lines of

<target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>

so they look like this

<target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>

Furthermore, remove all <address type .../> lines so that libvirt can regenerate them appropriately.

Inside the guest, edit /etc/fstab and replace all occurrences of /dev/sdX with /dev/vdX`.

That's it, now shutdown the machine and start it with an virsh start <your_vm_name> (just a reboot inside the started VM won't work).

Linux
  1. Dan Pilcheck May 23, 2013 at 23:15

    Dirk,
    I don’t normally do this, but… thanks!

    This post gave me the clue I needed to save the day.
    We use Proxmox VE so no virsh, but the idea is still transferable.

    Our Windows VM uses VIRTIO for disk emulation. That machine’s MBR was corrupted, and even though VIRTIO drivers loaded, the disk wasn’t seen during windows repair operations.

    Switching from ‘virtio0’ to ‘sata0’ in the config enables the Windows VM to display the disk, and thus be able to start repairs and system restore. The system restore failed – as I think Windows did not like the hardware change to ‘sata0’ despite this I changed the disk back to ‘virtio0’ next reboot, and Windows was properly restored!

    The lesson is to backup even new VMs! But nonetheless a fun exercise. Thanks for the post.

    Reply

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