[fedora-virt] I/O load distribution

Pasi Kärkkäinen pasik at iki.fi
Mon Jul 27 16:22:27 UTC 2009


On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 03:15:05PM +0200, Dennis J. wrote:
> Hi,
> What is the best way to deal with I/O load when running several VMs on a 
> physical machine with local or remote storage?
> 
> What I'm primarily worried about is the case when several VMs cause disk 
> I/O at the same time. One example would be the "updatedb" cronjob of the 
> mlocate package. If you have say 5 VMs running on a physical System with a 
> local software raid-1 as storage and the all run updatedb at the same time 
> that causes all of them to run really slowly because the starve each other 
> fighting over the disk.
> 
> What is the best way to soften the impact of such a situation? Does it make 
> sense to use a hardware raid instead? How would the raid type affect the 
> performance in this case? Would the fact that the I/O load gets distributed 
> across multiple spindles in, say, a 4 disk hardware raid-5 have a big 
> impact on this?
> 
> I'm currently facing the problem where I fear that random disk I/O by too 
> many VMs on a physical system could cripple their performance even though I 
> have plenty of CPU cores/RAM left to run them.
> 
> Has anyone experience with this problem and maybe some data to shed some 
> light on this potential bottleneck for virtualization?
> 

Well, there's only so much IOPS you can get from a single disk.. (or raid1).

IO generated from multiple virtual machines is pretty random, so you just
need a lot of disks to make it faster.

Single 7200 rpm SATA disk will give you only 100-150 IOPS (IOs per second)
max.. 10 disks will give you 1000-1500 IOPS max.. it's pretty easy maths.

Also good RAID controller with big battery-backed write-cache will help, 
in some cases a lot.

If the IOS are not split evenly between VMs, you could use some tool like
dm-ioband to make sure IOs are split fairly between VMs.

-- Pasi




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