This article assumes a KVM guest that runs from raw or qcow2 devices using emulated ide access. Since some time now, full virtualisation for block devices is available, facilitating the benefit of paravirtualisation. Benchmarked in bonnie++, the difference looks like this, revealing a way better performance of virtio:
st build of the kvm virtio drivers are now available at fedoraproject.org. The drivers include virtio drivers for ballooning memory, virtioserial, network and viostor ( block drivers ). These drivers are signed but not WHQL and
Ganeti is a cluster virtual server management software tool built on top of existing virtualization technologies such as Xen or KVM and other Open Source software.
