[CentOS] KVM Host Disk Performance

[Chuck Munro]

On 04/04/2011 09:00 AM, compdoc wrote:
>
> It's possible to set up guests to use a block device that will get you the
> same disk I/O as the underlying storage.
>
> Is that what you're seeing? What speed does the host see when benchmarking
> the RAID volumes, and what speeds do the guests see?
>
>

Yes, I have been going on the assumption that I get close to native 
block device performance, but the test results tell me otherwise.  I see 
array rebuild data rates which seem reasonable ... in the order of 60 to 
80 MBytes/sec.  I'm using 256k chunks, with the stride size set to match 
the number of data drives.

Using bonnie++, I mounted one of the Guest RAID-6 filesystems on the 
Host, ran the default tests, unmounted, then booted the Guest and ran 
the same default tests.  The amount of RAM assigned was the same for 
both, to level the playing field a bit.

Direct comparisons between the two were difficult to judge, but the 
general result was that the Host was between 2:1 and 3:1 better than the 
Guest, which seems to be a rather large performance gap.  Latency 
differences were all over the map, which I find puzzling.  The Host is 
64-bit and the Guest 32-bit, if that makes any difference.  Perhaps 
caching between Host and Guest accounts for some of the differences.

At the moment my questions tend to be a bit academic.  I'm primarily 
wondering if RAID-10 is paranoid enough given the current quality of WD 
CaviarBlack drives (better than dirt-cheap consumer drives, but not 
enterprise grade).  My second question relates to whether or not the 
added overhead of using something like qcow2 would be offset by the 
advantages of more space efficiency and the copy-on-write feature.

I'd love to hear what other software RAID users think, especially 
regarding large-capacity drives.  It's rare for a modern drive to hand 
out bad data without an accompanying error condition (which the md 
driver should handle), but I have read that uncaught bad data is 
possible and would not be flagged in RAID arrays which don't use parity 
calculations.

Chuck