Qemu v1.7.1 & CentOS 6.4

Qemu v1.7.1 & CentOS 6.4

[Lane Eckley]

Hi Everyone,

I am running into performance issues with Windows guest VM's in
conjunction with the rather old version of Qemu-KVM that is currently
being shipped with rhel 6.4 and as such I am looking to upgrade to the
latest stable release of qemu (v1.7.1 if I am not mistaken).

As it stands now I have been unsuccessful in locating a good
guide/tutorial on how to correctly update (or remove & install) v1.7.1
- Does anyone have a good tutorial on how to properly get it installed
under CentOS 6 (or rhel 6 in general)?

The reason for the upgrade is due high context switch rate when the
Windows virtual VM's are idle causing the hypervisor machine to
utilize a lot more CPU than it should be. Based on my Google skills I
have located several threads noting upgrade to at least 0.12.4 should
help resolve the issue, however as it stands right now I really do not
have any confirmation of this.

As to CentOS, unfortunately the control panel system we are using
currently limits us to rhel 6 based distros and as such swapping to a
debian based distro or otherwise is not currently an option.

Any advice & feedback would be very much appreciated.

Thanks!

-Lane

Re: Qemu v1.7.1 & CentOS 6.4

[Brian Jackson]

On 03/28/2014 03:55 PM, Lane Eckley wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I am running into performance issues with Windows guest VM's in
> conjunction with the rather old version of Qemu-KVM that is currently
> being shipped with rhel 6.4 and as such I am looking to upgrade to the
> latest stable release of qemu (v1.7.1 if I am not mistaken).
>
> As it stands now I have been unsuccessful in locating a good
> guide/tutorial on how to correctly update (or remove & install) v1.7.1
> - Does anyone have a good tutorial on how to properly get it installed
> under CentOS 6 (or rhel 6 in general)?
>
> The reason for the upgrade is due high context switch rate when the
> Windows virtual VM's are idle causing the hypervisor machine to
> utilize a lot more CPU than it should be. Based on my Google skills I
> have located several threads noting upgrade to at least 0.12.4 should
> help resolve the issue, however as it stands right now I really do not
> have any confirmation of this.


RedHat very likely has backported any fixes and probably most
performance improvements from 0.12-1.7. I'd suggest upgrading to the
latest RHEL release and try to enable the hv-* options (hv-spinlocks,
hv-relaxed, hv-vapic, hv-time or whatever is supported by RHEL's kvm).
IIRC, there is also a document/page in the RHEL docs that talks
specifically about Windows guest performance.


>
> As to CentOS, unfortunately the control panel system we are using
> currently limits us to rhel 6 based distros and as such swapping to a
> debian based distro or otherwise is not currently an option.
>
> Any advice & feedback would be very much appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
>
> -Lane
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