Hello all,
I'm having quite an interesting time getting up to speed with KVM/QEMU and the various ways of creating virtual Guest VMs. But disk I/O performance remains a bit of a question mark for me. I'm looking for suggestions and opinions ....
This new machine has tons of disk space, lots of CPU cores and loads of RAM, so those are not issues.
I currently have several software RAID-6 md's, each of which is about 700 GBytes. The md's are created as partitionable arrays, and I assign the resulting "raw" disk devices to each CentOS Guest OS, which then partitions the space according to its needs.
Unlike using the more common "filesystem-in-a-file" method, the use of partitionable MD devices usually results in wasted disk space, but my aim is to provide the best performance possible with robust RAID.
Is there a better-performing way of assigning disk space to Guest VMs? What about 'qcow2'? I understand its copy-on-write offers several advantages, but does it perform better than using partitionable md arrays or does the underlying filesystem overhead get in the way?
Perhaps the native overhead of RAID-6 dual parity makes the whole question moot. Would the use of RAID-10 with hot spares be paranoid enough? I'm using 2 TByte drives which inherently have much greater chances of data errors, so I must keep data reliability in mind.
I don't want to start a religious war over RAID and Guest VM disk methodology, but I have the luxury of trying various disk configurations until I get a reasonable balance between performance and reliability with these large drives.
So many questions ... so much to learn. Lots of Googling around is quite useful but can lead to information overload :-)
Cheers, Chuck