Open Stack

On Thu, Oct 22, 2015 at 06:01:42PM +0000, Marc Heckmann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Thu, 2015-10-22 at 08:17 -0700, Abel Lopez wrote:
> > I've actually looked for this for our RBD backed ephemeral instances,
> > but found the options lacking. I last looked in Juno. 
> > 
> > On Thursday, October 22, 2015, Tim Bell <Tim.Bell at cern.ch> wrote:
> >          
> >         
> >         Has anyone had experience with setting up Nova with KVM so it
> >         has raw ephemeral disks but qcow2 images for the VMs ? We’ve
> >         got very large ephemeral disks and could benefit from the
> >         performance of raw volumes for this.
> 
> We looked into this for the very same reasons and it doesn't seem to be
> supported.
> 
> That being said, I'm fearful of the boot time performance impact of
> using RAW for ephemeral.

There should be no performance impact of using fully pre-allocated
raw images. Any decent modern filesystem (ext4, xfs) supports fallocate
which allows you to pre-allocate an arbitrary sizes plain file in
constant time.

By default Nova does *not* preallocate images - so both raw & qcow2
will grow-on-demand as guest writes to sectors.

If the "preallocate_images" nova.conf option is set to "space", then
Nova will call fallocate for both raw & qcow2 images to fully allocate
the maximum space they require. There's no appreciable time overhead
for this - it just prevents you overcommitting disk obviously.

If you fully preallocate a qcow2 image its performance should pretty
much match raw images (modulo the l2-cache-size item mentioned
below), unfortunately, the way Nova is preallocating qcow2 images is
wrong - it preallocates the space on disk, but does not pre-initialize
the internal qcow2 data structures to match :-( So we need to fix
that for qcow2 in Nova.

> I suggest you check out the following presentation about qcow2
> performance if you haven't already done so:
> 
> http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/p0.pp_.pdf
> 
> I think it would be worthwhile for Openstack (and libvirt if required)
> to support the "l2-cache-size" option for qcow2.

Yep, we should look at supporting that.


Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|