Virtio-FS

[Chris123]

Any chance we will see Virtio-FS for host<->guest KVM/QEMU in SCALE? If not GUI, through CLI maybe?

 

[Newfoundland.Republic]

Maybe posting the request on the Jira portal?

 

[morganL]

It's best to always explain why you want it, the problems it solves and whether you've had previous experience using it.

 

[Chris123]

It's best to always explain why you want it, the problems it solves and whether you've had previous experience using it.

1) VMs that are not connected to a network for various reasons but require access to shared storage on the host.
2) High throughput, low latency, and reliability.

Now when TrueNAS is moving towards hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, a near-native speed shared storage between VMs would be great -- especially true for HPC applications.

Samba (and NFS) is always an option when there is a network, but it's slow and often unreliable.

In terms of speed and latency, I see Virtio-FS almost like a virtual "Infiniband".

 

[Chris123]

I'm using it in Proxmox, through CLI. NVME storage on host shared by Linux and Windows VMs.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

@Chris123 What @morganL probably suggested was to explain your reasoning - which I think is perfectly valid, BTW - in the JIRA issue.

 

[Chris123]

Wasn't that good enough reasoning?

A need for high-speed shared storage between VM's, particularly for VMs not connected to a network.

From what I learned using KVM/QEMU on Proxmox, there is no out-of-the-box solution for that. My use is for HPC, but I'm sure there are other applications that would benefit from it too.

Yes, I can write it in JIRA.

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

It was well good enough, but you won't reach the developers in this forum. If you wan't to tell anything to iXsystems/the dev team, the forum is not the platform. JIRA is.

 

[morganL]

The sort of follow on question is why aren't the VMs connected to a network... and what happens when the VMs span multiple machines?
Normally, we'd recommend NFS or SMB because it provides that scalability. Gluster may add even more performance.

 

[Chris123]

The sort of follow on question is why aren't the VMs connected to a network... and what happens when the VMs span multiple machines?
Normally, we'd recommend NFS or SMB because it provides that scalability. Gluster may add even more performance.

Performance and stability for me, but I assume there are other applications that require some kind of "virtual air gap" to isolate VMs from the network. If VM spans multiple machines the preference for my application is Infiniband.

 

[morganL]

In general, we'd recommend "virtual airgap" by having a VLAN with no external access.

Infiniband doesn't provide the shared filesystem you are after.. most HPC users would use NFS or Lustre. We don't plan to support Lustre, but gluster provides similar parallel bandwidth characteristics.

I'd recommend trying NFS and see if it performs well enough.... if not, identify how much faster it needs to be and whether the software or the hardware is the limitation.