Fedora 12-KVM-Windows 7

[Kwan Lowe]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:00 PM, Tom Horsley <horsley1953 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 18:25:36 -0400
> Jim wrote:
>
>> Installing Windows 7 in KVM and Fedora 12 , would win 7 be slower in virt.
>>
>> Good or Bad Ideal ?
>
> Don't know about Windows 7, but my XP virtual machine runs faster
> on my fedora box as a KVM than my real windows XP box runs (of course
> the real Windows XP box is on slower hardware :-).
>
> The only thing that seems slower is disk I/O, and that is probably
> because I mostly use a network filesystem for everything. I suspect
> the redhat virtio drivers and an LVM backed disk image would even
> make disk I/O almost as good as real hardware.

That's been my experience. Unfortunately, Win7 seems to hit the disk
quite a bit more than Linux so the slowdown is magnified. A Google
query for "windows 7 disk activity" will show thousands of hits and
steps to minimize the disk access. You might even go as far as
isolating the Win7 systems to their own disks if possible otherwise it
will kill throughput to the other instances.