After some benchmarking with random write loads we decided to go for RAW for a 
subset of hypervisors.
These hypervisors run only flavors for heavy IO workloads (databases).

On SSDs I noticed a performance increase (IOPS) for RAW vs QCOW of a factor 
8-10.
I was somewhat surprised by the difference.
There might be something fishy in our setup because the general consensus seems 
to be QCOW should not
impact performance that much.
Maybe it has something to do with SSDs or because we have no RAID controllers 
with caching..

For us, with QCOW, the hypervisor seem to be limited by (also) doing lots of 
reads when writing.
( I'm running CentOS. )

I'd do some performance testing for your expected workload.
Starting a vm and doing a fio benchmark is not that time intensive :)

Cheers,
Robert van Leeuwen



________________________________
From: Nhan Cao [[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2014 5:27 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Openstack] which image format you use for qemu?

hi guys,
i have a question.
which format to use for qemu hypervisor for performance - raw or qcow2?
Thanks
_______________________________________________
Mailing list: http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack
Post to     : [email protected]
Unsubscribe : http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openstack

Reply via email to