Re: [PLUG] Switching VM drive from SATA to virtio

["Rich Mingin \(PLUG\) via plug" <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 9:15 PM Walt Mankowski via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've got a Win10 VM running under virt-manager/qemu on Ubuntu 22.10. I
> set it up during lockdown, and it's become my go-to way to access the
> work VPN when I'm working from home.
>
> It works about as well as a Win10 box can, with one exception -- it's
> very slow, especially when doing disk IO. This wasn't a huge problem
> when I was running it every day, but now that I'm only firing it up
> occasionally, there's a system update nearly every time, and they can
> take hours to install. It's gotten to the point where if I know I need
> to work from home, I'll start it up the prior evening so that it will
> be usable in the morning.
>
> I've got the VM booting off a 250 GB partition. (This is part of what
> I'm using my 3 TB RAID1 array for from my previous questions.) After
> doing some google searches, I think maybe a big reason for the
> slowness is that the drive is set as SATA, but performance would be a
> lot better if it were virtio.
>
> Does anyone know if it's possible to switch the drive from SATA to
> virtio without having to rebuild everything? I've found some links
> that suggest it is, but if so, the process seems fairly complicated.
> If anyone could point me towards some instructions that they trust,
> I'd appreciate it.
>

You can. It's not even particularly complicated. Create a new disk,
size doesn't matter. 16GB or whatever. Attach it to the VM via virtio.
Once that's done, boot the VM, install the virtio drivers via
https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso

Once Windows has the virtio drivers loaded, reboot once or twice to
make sure it's solid, then change the main virtual disk's type to
virtio. It should boot fine. After another reboot or two to be sure
Windows is settled and happy, remove the temporary virtio disk. Done.

Hope your performance improves.

- OtherRich

> Thanks!
>
> Walt
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