Re: [user question] Opinions about running Windows in KVM

[Andrew Cathrow <acathrow@redhat.com>]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Marc Haber" <mh+kvm@zugschlus.de>
> To: "KVM" <kvm@vger.kernel.org>
> Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2012 7:47:11 AM
> Subject: [user question] Opinions about running Windows in KVM
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I am a heavy user of virtualization in my private zoo of systems. My
> main Operating System is Debian, and I am running a multitude of
> other
> Linuxen inside KVM, and also a handful of Windows systems that are
> still using VirtualBox.
> 
> However, VirtualBox has losing attractivity since there are issues
> that prevent current VirtualBox from being packaged for Debian
> (VirtualBox 4.2 needing the non-free OpenWatcom compiler to build),
> and the latest VirtualBox in Debian (4.1.18) does not build its
> kernel
> module with Linux 3.7.
> 
> I would therefore like to migrate my Windows guests to KVM as well.
> Judging from what one finds on the net, this is possible thanks to
> Fedora/Red Hat's work on virtio-win, which has not been updated since
> july 2012. The documentation on
> http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/WindowsGuestDrivers/Download_Drivers
> has
> also not been touched in a while.

I'll check to see if there are newer drivers available but they don't change that often.
http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/virtio-win/latest/images/bin/


> 
> I proceeded to do a test install of Windows 7 in a KVM VM which only
> worked after configuring a second virtual CD-ROM drive and giving the
> Windows 7 installer access to the virtio-win.iso from the very
> beginning (the dreaded F6 option). If it's important, the VM is
> configured with libvirt 0.9.15, has two virtual cores off a Core i7
> Quad Core host and 2 Gigs of RAM. libvirt's Virtual Machine Manager
> is
> used to get access to the VM's graphics console.

Another approach is the put those drivers in a virtual floppy drive 


> 
> After the install and the resulting patch orgy finished, I noticed
> that the KVM-based Windows install was running much slower than an
> existing Windows 7 guest running under VirtualBox (on the same
> hardware and a similiarly configured VM), which is odd since
> sparkling new Windows installs usually tend to run much better than
> an

Where you using virtio-blk or emulated IDE? 


> install that has been used for months. A few benchmarks showed that
> the KVM-based Windows suffers from I/O performance that is almost an
> order of magnitude slower than the one running based on VirtualBox.
> 
> I would like to know whether I did something wrong, or if there is
> another way to achieve compareable I/O performance in a Windows VM on
> KVM than it is reachable with a trivial VirtualBox installation.
> 
> On another point: The VirtualBox graphics drivers for Windows have an
> option to couple the Windows desktop size to the size of the guest
> Window. That is, when I resize the X11 Window that shows the VM
> desktop, the desktop is automatically resized to fill the window
> completely.

Try using spice with the windows guest tools which will give you copy and paste, cursor handling, resolution matching etc.
http://www.spice-space.org/download.html

> 
> On KVM, I understand that the canonical way to run Windows in a VM is
> to use the graphics drivers from VMWare as the graphics card emulated
> by qemu-kvm is VMWare compatible. But it looks like this doesn't work
> since Windows claims to have a "Standard VGA graphics adapter" which
> is rather slow and only offers a list of standard screen resolutions
> which also does not adapt to window size. I guess this is an issue
> that I better address on a LibVirt mailing list, right?
> 
> I would appreciate any comments, and - if appropriate - pointers to
> other mailing lists that may help with getting Windows 7 to run
> better
> under KVM.
> 
> Greetings
> Marc
> 
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Marc Haber         | "I don't trust Computers. They | Mailadresse im
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> Mannheim, Germany  |  lose things."    Winona Ryder | Fon: *49 621
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