Arch Linux

gigobytes

Member

Registered: 2011-05-31

Posts: 2

VirtualBox Raw Disk Performance / Network Performance on Arch Linux

I seem to be running into some kind of bottleneck when passing through 6 raw disks to a VirtualBox Machine and creating cifs network shares.

System Setup:

AMD quad-core 3ghz
8 GB Ram

1 x 160GB 5400rpm OS Drive
1 x 1TB 7200rpm Virtual Machine Drive
6 x 2TB 5900rpm ZFS Raidz Drives

2 x Intel 10/100 NICs (For Wireless/DMZ and WAN)
1 x On board nForce 10/100/1000 NIC for LAN

The OS and VM Machine drives are on a 2 port SATA RAID card (PCI-e). The 6x2TB Drives are connected to the 6 sata motherboard ports. When the pool is mounted to the physical machine, I am not getting any bottlenecks with transfer speeds.

I am running VirtualBox 4.0.8 OSE from pacman, kernel26-lts, and everything else is up to date. In a VM I have tested running FreeNAS and Nexenta with my ZFS raidz pool. Both were running in bridged network mode to my on board 1000mbps LAN nic with all 6 raw disks passed through to them. I also have one other VM running which is pfsense and it has all 3 nics in bridged mode.

The max speed I can get on a cifs file share on both FreeNAS and Nexenta VM's is about 20mb/s read speed and 30mb/s write speeds. I have even given the VM 5GB of ram and 2 cores just to see if it would help. Both the host and VM have very low CPU usage the entire transfer. On the same host I usually hit ~90mb/s on file shares when its not virtual.

Does anyone have any suggestions for improving the performance of raw disks or network performance in a VirtualBox VM under an Arch host? This may be just the normal performance drop for raw disks but I can not seem to find any benchmarks online to compare to. I'm also not sure if it could be a network bottleneck with virtualbox.

Thanks for any help.

otterfox

Member

Registered: 2010-08-05

Posts: 21

Re: VirtualBox Raw Disk Performance / Network Performance on Arch Linux

I'm not sure about virtualbox in particular but you may have much better IO performance after getting virtio drivers working with the guests.

Last edited by otterfox (2011-06-03 11:07:51)

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R00KIE

Forum Fellow

From: Between a computer and a chair

Registered: 2008-09-14

Posts: 4,734

Re: VirtualBox Raw Disk Performance / Network Performance on Arch Linux

If you are going to set it and forget it maybe you should look into using KVM, it will probably give you less worries if you want to keep the host updated.

You can run vbox images directly with KVM so just backup the guest image a give it a go (of course you'll have to read the man page of qemu-kvm to learn how to set things up).

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R00KIE
Tm90aGluZyB0byBzZWUgaGVyZSwgbW92ZSBhbG9uZy4K

gigobytes

Member

Registered: 2011-05-31

Posts: 2

Re: VirtualBox Raw Disk Performance / Network Performance on Arch Linux

I'm looking into trying out KVM now with the Virtio drivers. Seeing what kind of performance I can get with it. It is looking promising so far!

Thanks for the suggestions.