You are defining storage for a new Linux virtual machine that will run on a KVM host managed with libvirt. The workload requires about 80 virtual disks, and you want to keep disk I/O paravirtualized for best performance. A standard virtio-blk device consumes one PCI slot per disk and is limited to roughly 28 disks on the common i440fx machine type. Which VirtIO controller should you specify in the domain XML so the guest can attach all of the disks without running out of PCI slots?
The virtio-scsi controller appears to the guest as a single paravirtualized SCSI host bus adapter. One virtio-scsi device can expose thousands of LUNs, so a single PCI slot is enough for far more than 80 disks. In contrast, virtio-blk creates one PCI device for every disk and becomes constrained by the 32-device PCI limit (about 28 disks after other devices are present). virtio-net is a network interface and provides no storage, while virtio-balloon is used for memory reclamation, not disks. Therefore, selecting virtio-scsi solves the scalability problem and keeps storage paravirtualized.
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CompTIA Linux+ XK0-006 (V8)
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