As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was thinking of using KVM in a production environment. I've done some performance testing recently, and here is some thinge I've discovered:

• "virtio_net" has great performance.
• "virtio_blk" has really poor (write) performance.
• There seems to be a bug with virtio and >3.5G memory in a guest.

I did some performance testing (bonnie/dd) and got 40M/sec in write performance using virtio in the guest. I got 260M/s natively in the host, This is a known issue, and the developers hope to get fixes in during the 2.6.26 timeframe.

I've previously deployed XEN (and VMWare) in a production environment, with quite high I/O workloads. This solution works adequate but I feel that the project might have lost its momentum.

Now that Ubuntu seems to have opted for KVM as its main virtualization platform, and I want to start using Ubuntu as the base OS for most Linux installations, I wonder if anyone here has used KVM with the new virtio drivers in a real production environment?

I guess performance should be somewhat close to XEN, at least the IO, I'm more concerned about stability issues and corruption bugs.