Xen project Mailing List

For a single disk/SATA controller, use LVM raw volumes for your domU. If you have more SATA controllers on your M/B and a dedicated disk for your domU you may try passing through a SATA controller to domU.

I've noticed that installing the GPLPV driver under Windows 7 domU significantly improves disk performance. Make a backup of the domU before installing the driver - sometimes the installation can fail and prevent the domU from booting.

On Sunday, May 25, 2014 8:33 PM, Zir Blazer <zir_blazer@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

According to your working config, this line...

disk=['file:/mnt/xen/gpt.raw,hda,w']

You are using a file as storage for the VM, correct? From the disk performance point of view, that is possibly the worst one. On my experience, if you use files as storage for VMs, performance for sequencial read and writes with big files is decent, but with small files and general I/O is very low. What you have to do, is make a LVM partition and give Xen a raw volume. That is supposed to be near-native performance.

May want to check this older Thread of mine. I read all the feedback but left it abandoned because I got lazy and stalled:
http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-users/2014-04/msg00166.html

Consensus about disk performance, is that if you have a simple single disk setup, using a LVM raw volume is the easiest and straightforward way to get the expected disk performance in the VM. I still didn't tried so can't tell you, but everything points than that will work.
With big Hardware your choices starts to grown, because you can pass a dedicated RAID Controller to the VM without the paravirtualized Drivers layer.

_______________________________________________
Xen-users mailing list
Xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xen.org/xen-users

Re: [Xen-users] Improving the performance of a Xen VM