There’re many ways to find out if you’re using VirtIO drivers. I also happen to use Lenny as the KVM host and have ran many guests using Lenny as well.

I can say you that when one uses virt-manager (the GUI tool from the libvirt project) from Debian it already uses VirtIO drivers by default for Lenny guests, both for disks and for networking.

You could just use “ps” from inside the host machine and check out if the KVM processes are using parameters as “model=virtio” for VirtIO networking (its on the “-net” options) and “if=virtio” for VirtIO disks (its on the “-drive” options).

Regards,

I have also installed the same “Debian GNU/Linux 5.0″ (Lenny) as a guest on KVM Host. How do I know whether this guest who is running on VM is using paravirtualization driver (virtio drivers)

I created VM using virt-install.

Your help is more than welcome.

Thanks.

Unfortunately, I cannot quantify it. Everyone trying to adopt a technology like KVM should experiment with it and decide for him/herself if it’s worth it for his/her specific environment/workload.

That said, I have also been looking for serious benchmarks showing KVM performance on real world scenarios, but I had no luck to date.

If you can find something interesting and current (benchmarks based on ancient versions aren’t all that useful today), please let me know. I would be glad to read them if anyone could point me to them

Anyway, thanks for your comment.

Surely. Growth in the datacenter is always nice. It’s not to say that Debian couldn’t be used in the datacenter already. It’s just that with these kind of features it starts to become a more tasty option for those which weren’t considering it yet.

Personally, I have some Debian servers in a datacenter as well as costumers servers. And some time ago I did some work for a company which had 95% of their servers based on Debian and all of them were hosted in a datacenter

Debian has a lot (I mean, “really” a lot) of users and a huge part of its users are corporate users. It’s just that these people doesn’t like to go around saying which kind of solutions they use for their infrastructure.

Anyway, thanks for your comments and for your visit. I hope you could come back here again and become a regular visitor.

Regards,

Thanks for sharing your init script. I surely will give it a try And thanks also for pointing out that the unix-socket way is safer than using a TCP-socket.

Now I have plenty of material to start playing around.

Regards,

http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/tmp/kvm/

It was deliberately written in a way that suited my needs, and could be dropped into /etc/init.d.

I do something similar to you – only I don’t use a TCP-socket I use a unix-socket which is slightly more secure. To shutdown an instance I rely upon APCI and a system-powerdown event which I can send to the socket via socat.

Yes, some things are easier today than back then when you wrote xen-tools, specially considering that today there are tools such as virt-install and virt-manager.

Regarding connecting to the KVM monitor, I usually launch KVM using the -monitor parameter and bind it to a local TCP port so I can telnet to it and give commands from there. Just don’t do a “quit” from inside the monitor or else your KVM guest will be shut down

I agree that it’s not the most secure way to do it, but as I didn’t knew a safer way to do it, it at least got the job done. But I liked your way of running it from a screen session and attaching to it. I surely will try that way next time I need to launch one of my KVM guests.

Also, I’m looking forward to your KVM-shell. Coming from you, I’m sure this will be neat stuff.

Thanks for commenting and keep up the good work.