[one-users] Using OpenNebula for Linux desktops

[ML mail]

Dear Carlo,

Thanks for your suggestions, I will add my comments and details below regarding the various performance points you mention.

So yes I am using QXL as video driver, for that purpose I have added to my ONE template the following RAW data:

<devices><video><model type="qxl" heads="1"></model></video></devices>

As far as I remember AIO=native is the default and as such I should already be using native AIO.

As data storage I am using an NFS server with a SATA JBOD in hardware RAID6 (HP hardware). I am sharing the datastores from that server using the following export:

/data/one/datastores/101    192.168.1.0/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check,root_squash)

Then on my ONE hosts I mount them using the following fstab entry:

192.168.1.2:/data/one/datastores/101  /var/lib/one/datastores/101  nfs   soft,intr,rsize=8192,wsize=8192

Regarding the cache setting in the ONE template I always use none as I read quite often that in most of the cases cache should be set to none.

Using iotop (great tool btw!) to measure IO activity and using the image at the same time does not show much IO activity so I don't think IO is the bottleneck, also it is the only VM I am running on a test setup.

Other info to mention maybe: I am using a test VM with 4 GB of RAM and 4 CPU running on a host with dual Quad-Core Intel E5504 @2GHz (approx. 3 years old CPU). The resolution I am using for the desktop is 1680x1050. For your reference, below is the full KVM process which is running on the ONE host:

/usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-1.1 -enable-kvm -m 4096 -smp 4,sockets=4,cores=1,threads=1 -name one-70 -uuid 8429d2bf-553f-d503-83e4-c44fc626de5c -no-user-config -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=charmonitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/one-70.monitor,server,nowait -mon chardev=charmonitor,id=monitor,mode=control -rtc base=utc -no-shutdown -device piix3-usb-uhci,id=usb,bus=pci.0,addr=0x1.0x2 -drive file=/var/lib/one//datastores/101/70/disk.0,if=none,id=drive-virtio-disk0,format=qcow2,cache=none -device virtio-blk-pci,scsi=off,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4,drive=drive-virtio-disk0,id=virtio-disk0,bootindex=1 -drive file=/var/lib/one//datastores/101/70/disk.1,if=none,id=drive-ide0-0-0,readonly=on,format=raw -device
 ide-cd,bus=ide.0,unit=0,drive=drive-ide0-0-0,id=ide0-0-0 -netdev tap,fd=20,id=hostnet0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=hostnet0,id=net0,mac=02:00:b9:0f:1f:29,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3 -spice port=5970,addr=0.0.0.0,disable-ticketing -vga qxl -global qxl-vga.vram_size=67108864 -device virtio-balloon-pci,id=balloon0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5

Let me know if you need any more infos... Looking forward to your feedback.

Regards,
M.L.




On Tuesday, January 28, 2014 4:50 AM, Carlo Daffara <carlo.daffara at cloudweavers.eu> wrote:
 
There are several things you can do to improve basic performance. First of all, if you use SPICE as a protocol use QXL as the KVM video card, it will provide a substantial
speedup (the emulated video card will be much more intelligent and the job of protocol compression will be much simpler). Then, IO speedup is the second low-hanging fruit. We
use aio=native, and this alone substantially increases io rates. The next step depend on the kind of datastore you use- NFS, an external SAN, etc. If you can provide some additional details I can give some more options. For example, for machines that require high random R/W we use cache=none as it does decrease double buffering, thus improving performance. 
You can use iotop on the machine that executes the KVM process to check how much does it write, and why.
In our tests, using OpenNebula on top of the MFS distributed filesystem we easily get VDI
 performance near to that of the hardware with limited tuning.
regards,
carlo daffara
CloudWeavers


----- Messaggio originale -----
Da: "ML mail" <mlnospam at yahoo.com>
A: "users" <users at lists.opennebula.org>
Inviato: Lunedì, 27 gennaio 2014 16:51:19
Oggetto: [one-users] Using OpenNebula for Linux desktops

Hi, 

I am currently evaluating OpenNebula for running KVM virtual machines which will be used as Linux desktops with the SPICE protocol. For now I have tried Fedora 20 as a desktop system with KDE and
 SPICE (using remote viewer) but I am quite disappointed with the performance. The desktop reacts quite slowly even basic things like displaying the main menu and using the terminal even on a 1 Gig LAN. 

So does anyone out there really use OpenNebula for this purpose with success? and are there any recommendations for speeding up things in order to make it really usable. 

Cheers, 
M.L. 

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