A systems engineer creates a new guest on a KVM host. The guest's virtual disk is presented as an emulated IDE device, and benchmark results inside the VM show sustained write throughput that is far lower than other VMs that use the same back-end storage. The engineer wants to improve disk I/O performance without replacing the underlying storage hardware or moving the VM to a different host.
Which change is MOST likely to reduce the disk latency and increase throughput for this virtual machine?
Create a snapshot of the VM and then revert to it to eliminate disk fragmentation
Convert the existing disk image from raw to qcow2 to enable copy-on-write allocation
Enable CPU passthrough mode so the guest uses the host's full instruction set
Replace the IDE disk with a VirtIO block device and load the appropriate paravirtualized driver inside the guest
Emulated IDE devices must translate every guest disk operation through full device emulation, which adds CPU overhead and increases latency. Switching the virtual disk bus to the paravirtualized VirtIO block device and installing the matching driver inside the guest lets the guest issue near-native hypercalls, eliminating most of the emulation overhead and typically delivering throughput close to bare-metal levels.
Taking a snapshot (or reverting to one) does not defragment or speed up I/O; snapshots actually add copy-on-write overhead while they exist. Converting a disk from raw to qcow2 enables space-saving and snapshot features but usually adds a small amount of I/O overhead rather than reducing it. Enabling CPU passthrough can improve compute-bound workloads, but it does not change how block I/O is virtualized, so it has little impact on disk latency.
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What is a VirtIO block device, and why is it faster than an IDE device?
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