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separator Tutorials KVM Enable virtio for existing VM’s

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Backup VM config

Edit VM Config

Changes to Guest VM's filesystem

For changes to reflect

Enable virtio for existing VM’s

On one of our host machine, we get around 70MB/second disk write speed, but KVM guest machine was giving us around 18MB/s write performance.

At that point we came to know about virtio driver. Here is guide to enable virtio

Backup VM config


			virsh dumpxml <vmname> > ~/vmname.xml

Replace vmname with Virtual Machine (Domain) name. You can find correct name by running virsh list --all

Edit VM Config

Run following command to open editor.


			virsh edit <vmname>

Find lines like below:


			<disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/ubuntu-kvm/tmpU2z98r.qcow2'/>
      <target dev='hda' bus='ide'/>
      <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/>
    </disk>

Make following changes:

Replacehda withvda ANDide with virtio
Remove following line: <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' unit='0'/>
Add cache='none' io='native' option to driver.

Your update config will look like below:


			<disk type='file' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2' cache='none' io='native'/>
      <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/ubuntu-kvm/tmpU2z98r.qcow2'/>
      <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/>
    </disk>

Save your changes and exit editor.

Changes to Guest VM’s filesystem

I am not sure if this step is necessary but one tutorial mentions this. I did not try outcome without this step as VM’s I was playing with has some critical data.

Anyway, login to Guest VM’s shell and open in editor vim /etc/fstab

Fine lines like /dev/sdX. Replace 's' with 'v'.

So /dev/sda1 will become /dev/vda1 and /dev/sda2 will become /dev/vda2 and so on.

For changes to reflect

Shutdown Guest VM for its shell. You can use command shutdown 0

Next, from Host machine, run following commands:


			virsh destroy <vmname>
virsh start <vmname>

virsh reboot won’t work.

At this point you can run your disk I/O benchmarks again to check speed.

In our case performance shoot-up from 18MB/s to 40.8 MB/s.

Convert qcow2 to raw format

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Comments

shrijan

February 23, 2014

Hi

Am using KVM in linux. My guest is windows 7. I had a problem windows 7, so i deleted it and left the virtio disk Windows7-KVM.qcow2 untouched.

After that i build one more vm “Virtual_Client_for_Linux_Windows_7-KVM”, whose virtio disk is Virtual_Client_for_Linux_Windows_7-KVM.qcow2.

Now added the “Windows7-KVM.qcow2” to my new virtual machine through virt-manager, but once virtual machine boots up, am not able to see the newly added “Windows7-KVM-qcow2”.

Below is the xml configuration of new vritual machine “Virtual_Client_for_Linux_Windows_7-KVM” for two disk:

<disk type='file' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2' cache='writeback'/> <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/Virtual_Client_for_Linux_Windows_7-KVM.qcow2'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x06' function='0x0'/> </disk> <disk type='file' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='qcow2' cache='writeback'/> <source file='/var/lib/libvirt/images/Windows7-KVM.qcow2'/> <target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x09' function='0x0'/> </disk>

Could you let me know, why its not detecting new disk.
1. Rahul Bansal
  
  February 26, 2014
  
  Sorry. I won’t be able to help with this as I haven’t used Windows in long time.

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