Bring gigabit to your VM’s NIC!
I. About the virtio driver
It’s part of KVM best practices to enable the virtio driver.
KVM can provide two type of devices to the guest operating system:
- emulated
- para-virtualized
Compared to emulated devices, para-virtualized devices provide lower latency and higher throughput for I/O operations of guest operating systems. KVM includes the VirtIO API to para-virtualize devices.
The VirtIO API is a high performance API written by Rusty Russell which uses virtual I/O. It para-virtualized devices use to increase speed and efficiency. The VirtIO API specifies an interface (virtio net) between virtual machines and hypervisors that is independent of the hypervisor. In typical situations, VirtIO para-virtualized devices provide lower latency and higher throughput for I/O operations of guest operating systems. VirtIO para-virtualized devices are especially useful for guest operating systems that run I/O heavy tasks and applications.
II. Syndrome
Pick up 2 instances, from one run:
$ iperf -s
------------------------------------------------------------
Server listening on TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 85.3 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
When the driver is disable:
ubuntu@vm-without-virtio:~$ iperf -c 192.168.22.49 -i1 -t 10
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.22.49, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 47.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 192.168.22.50 port 39421 connected with 192.168.22.49 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 12.0 MBytes 101 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 12.4 MBytes 104 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 12.4 MBytes 104 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 12.1 MBytes 102 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 12.5 MBytes 105 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 12.4 MBytes 104 Mbits/sec
...
...
When the driver is enable:
ubuntu@vm-with-virtio:~$ iperf -c 192.168.22.47 -i1 -t 10
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.22.47, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 23.5 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[ 3] local 192.168.22.49 port 43018 connected with 192.168.22.47 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0- 1.0 sec 112 MBytes 944 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 1.0- 2.0 sec 112 MBytes 940 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 2.0- 3.0 sec 112 MBytes 940 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 3.0- 4.0 sec 112 MBytes 940 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 4.0- 5.0 sec 112 MBytes 940 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 5.0- 6.0 sec 112 MBytes 938 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 6.0- 7.0 sec 112 MBytes 935 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 7.0- 8.0 sec 111 MBytes 928 Mbits/sec
[ 3] 8.0- 9.0 sec 112 MBytes 936 Mbits/sec
...
...
III. Enable it!
First of all, we have to verify that virtio is in the list of supported devices:
$ sudo kvm -net nic,model=?
qemu: Supported NIC models: ne2k_pci,i82551,i82557b,i82559er,rtl8139,e1000,pcnet,virtio
Nova manages this via the libvirt template in /usr/share/pyshared/nova/virt/libvirt.xml.template with:
<interface type='bridge'>
<source bridge='${nic.bridge_name}'/>
<mac address='${nic.mac_address}'/>
#if $getVar('use_virtio_for_bridges', True)
<model type='virtio'/>
You also have to enable the flag in your nova.conf:
--libvirt_use_virtio_for_bridges=true
This will enable the -device virtio-net-pci in kvm.
Simply restart libvirt-bin and let’s roll!
It could be a shame to don’t use this option since obviously everyone’s network use Gigabit connection ;-)