Open Stack

Hello Operators,

One of the things that constantly puzzles me when reading the user
survey results wrt hypervisor is the high number of respondants
claiming to be using QEMU (as distinct from KVM).

As a reminder, in Nova saying virt_type=qemu causes Nova to use
plain QEMU with pure CPU emulation which is many many times slower
to than native CPU performance, while virt_type=kvm causes Nova to
use QEMU with KVM hardware CPU acceleration which is close to native
performance.

IOW, virt_type=qemu is not something you'd ever really want to use
unless you had no other options due to the terrible performance it
would show. The only reasons to use QEMU are if you need non-native
architecture support (ie running arm/ppc on x86_64 host), or if you
can't do KVM due to hardware restrictions (ie ancient hardware, or
running compute hosts inside virtual machines)

Despite this, in the 2016 survey 10% claimed to be using QEMU in
production & 3% in PoC and dev, in 2014 it was even higher at 15%
in prod & 12% in PoC and 28% in dev.

Personally my gut feeling says that QEMU usage ought to be in very
low single figures, so I'm curious as to the apparent anomoly.

I can think of a few reasons

 1. Respondants are confused as to the difference between QEMU
    and KVM, so are saying QEMU, despite fact they are using KVM.

 2. Respondants are confused as to the difference between QEMU
    and KVM, so have mistakenly configured their nova hosts to
    use QEMU instead of KVM and suffering poor performance without
    realizing their mistake.

 3. There are more people than I expect who are running their
    cloud compute hosts inside virtual machines, and thus are
    unable to use KVM.

 4. There are more people than I expect who are providing cloud
    hosting for non-native architectures. eg ability to run an
    arm7/ppc guest image on an x86_64 host and so genuinely must
    use QEMU

If items 1 / 2 are the cause, then by implication the user survey
is likely under-reporting the (already huge) scale of the KVM usage.

I can see 3. being a likely explanation for high usage of QEMU in a
dev or PoC scenario, but it feels unlikely for a production deployment.

While 4 is technically possible, Nova doesn't really do a very good
job at mixed guest arch hosting - I'm pretty sure there are broken
pieces waiting to bite people who try it.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this topic ?

Indeed, is there anyone here who genuinely use virt_type=qemu in a
production deployment of OpenStack who might have other reasons that
I've missed ?

Regards,
Daniel
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