[fedora-virt] I/O load distribution

[Pasi Kärkkäinen]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 07:22:27PM +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> 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.
> 

.. Or then get faster disks. Single 15k rpm SAS disk will give you up to 350
IOPS, so it's 2-3x faster than 7200 rpm SATA.

-- Pasi