Thanks for the responses on this, I really appreciate it. For those that mentioned they actually installed the virtio drivers in their images for best performance, did you also modify the libvirt.pm module to define the VM's setting virtio for the disk and network interface types? I noticed that it's hard-coded to always specify IDE as the disk type and a default setting on NIC type, rather than specifying virtio. I would assume these should be set to virtio for the drivers to actually be used.
Mike Mike Waldron Systems Specialist ITS - Research Computing Center University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ________________________________ From: Waldron, Michael H Sent: Monday, July 08, 2013 3:31 PM To: [email protected] Subject: VMware vs. KVM on VCL I'm curious to hear about people's experiences/opinions with VMware and KVM on VCL. Up to this point, we have been using the free version of VMware ESXi, but I've done some testing with KVM, and it seems to work well also. It looks like the two will co-exist well, as KVM successfully converts the vmdk images to qcow2 format on the fly, and will even convert new images created on KVM back to vmdk format if the repository is defined as vmdk format. So I'm toying with the idea of migrating away from VMware and going to KVM, and wanted to hear about others experiences if they've done the same, or can compare performance between the two hypervisors. Also, if you are using KVM, what OS are you running it on. The testing I did was with KVM running on Fedora 16. Thanks, Mike Mike Waldron Systems Specialist ITS - Research Computing Center University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
