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

[Walt Mankowski via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Tue, Nov 22, 2022 at 09:20:38PM -0500, Rich Mingin (PLUG) via plug wrote:
> 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.

OK, that doesn't sound too bad. I'll give it a try over the long
weekend.

> Hope your performance improves.

Thanks!

Walt
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