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• Nicholas Kourtzis commented  ·  May 16, 2013 9:25 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Same here. I destroyed and rebuilt two of my droplets, enabling VirtIO. I rebuilt them using a snapshot I took just before destroying. All of lshw, lsmod and lspci show exactly the same results on these two droplets, as well as the third one (which was created some time ago, without virtio). Ioping also gives the same results (and actually higher on one of the two rebuilt droplets).

• Ben commented  ·  May 14, 2013 7:41 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Well, if I use what Hello71 says, I don't seem to get virtio on Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit. I spun up a couple of droplets, one with virtio checked, and one without. Both the 'ls /dev/[hsv]d[a-c]' and the 'lspci | grep -i virtio' show the same on both.

• Hello71 commented  ·  May 13, 2013 7:11 p.m.  ·  Delete

  ls /dev/[hsv]d[a-c]
  lspci | grep -i virtio

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  May 13, 2013 6:57 p.m.  ·  Delete

  The harddrive and network driver maybe different between the virtIO droplet and non virtio so you can spin up both of your preferred distro and check which each loads and then confirm that against your existing droplet.

  We are also going to be integrating the toggling of VirtIO on/off into the settings section of the droplet menu.

  Thanks

• Ben commented  ·  May 13, 2013 6:09 p.m.  ·  Delete

  Is there a way to tell from within the guest whether you're using virtio?

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  May 11, 2013 2:57 p.m.  ·  Delete

  We have enabled VirtIO for default on all creates both via the CP and the API.

  We've also added documentation to the API on how to enable/disable this during creates.

  Marking as completed. =]

• Morthawt commented  ·  April 1, 2013 6:02 p.m.  ·  Delete

  This is enabled on my droplet right now and I can tell everyone that the network reliability is much higher now. Before I could download a test 100MB file at about 13 MB/s but when doing a speed test through my VPN server I would only get a reading of about 3 - 5 Mbit connection speed.

  After my droplet has Virtio enabled I have seen my 100MB test file download much much faster. I actually just did a test and it downloaded at 38.9M/s and when I run a speedtest through speedtest.net I get connection speed readouts of 30 - 50 Mbit.

  Thumbs up from me :D Good work D.O, much more stable experience now.

• Alex Bradbury commented  ·  March 29, 2013 12:03 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Given that you are evaluating virtio-net, have you looked at vhost-net for acceleration of the virtio-net driver in the host kernel? Definitely worth looking at, though looks to me like qemu might go with virtio-net with data plane (to match the virtio-blk+dataplane that went in to qemu 1.4).

• Ali Firdaus commented  ·  March 20, 2013 5:09 a.m.  ·  Delete

  virtio network and virtio disk was design for virtual machine, I use it when creating vm on smartdata center.

• Alex Bradbury commented  ·  March 19, 2013 2:06 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Are your hosts using vhost-net (and your kvm configured to use it?)

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  March 7, 2013 10:46 a.m.  ·  Delete

  We have not added this functionality to the front-end but you can request virtIO to be enabled on a running droplet by opening a ticket for the time being.

  Thanks!

• reflexing commented  ·  March 7, 2013 3:26 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Is it possible to use VirtIO on existing Arch droplet?

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  March 5, 2013 7:18 a.m.  ·  Delete

  Just open a ticket if you dont see if in your create droplets page and we'll verify you and you'll have access to it.

• Mattias commented  ·  March 5, 2013 4:27 a.m.  ·  Delete

  I wonder how far this is from being available. It is almost a month from the Moiseys comment, so it might be not that far. If it would be only a week or so, I'd rather wait for it to be completed before moving in here. Any testers needed?

• Frederico Araujo commented  ·  February 22, 2013 8:57 a.m.  ·  Delete

  this looks interesting... virtio is definitely the way to go.

• Up commented  ·  February 16, 2013 3:13 p.m.  ·  Delete

  Upvote!

• Alfred Hall commented  ·  February 11, 2013 2:44 a.m.  ·  Delete

  @Moisey Thanks for this, will reinstall a droplet with virtio once the custom images feature is ready.

  @Kenn Thanks for the benchmark, this is quite useful.

• Kenn Ejima commented  ·  February 8, 2013 3:30 p.m.  ·  Delete

  Guys,

  I have some preliminary benchmark result using hdparm and bonnie++.

  https://gist.github.com/kenn/4741999 - without virtio
  https://gist.github.com/kenn/4742470 - with virtio

  Highlights:

  - Sequential block writes: Comparable
  - Sequential block reads: 2x faster in block reads, CPU is nearing saturation
  - Random Seeks: 1.5x faster, but CPU usage is 29% vs 80% - Virtio is much lighter
  - Sequential file creates: 2x faster
  - Sequential file reads: both are too fast to measure. :)
  - Sequential file deletes: 1.5x faster
  - Random file creates: 1.5x faster
  - Random file reads: too fast :)
  - Random file deletes: 1.5x faster
  - Latency: No notable difference in any tests

  Everything looks better with Virtio, clearly a big win.

• AdminMoisey Uretsky (Head of Product, Digital Ocean) commented  ·  February 8, 2013 11:27 a.m.  ·  Delete

  We've deployed virtio as a Labs (Beta) feature for older customers where they can set it during a new droplet create.

  We are going to run with that for a few days and see if there are any odd issues we run into with virtual servers failing to ping after creation and then roll that out to older customers again to reset their running virtual servers to virtio.

  If all of the testing looks good from there then we will continue to roll out more support for more customers for virtio.

  Thanks

• Alfred Hall commented  ·  February 8, 2013 2:19 a.m.  ·  Delete

  @Moisey any comments on this, 133 votes is not bad :).