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For a research project I am trying to boot as many VM's as possible, using python libvirt bindings, in KVM under Ubuntu server 12.04. All the VM's are set to idle after boot, and to use a minimum amount of memory. At the most I was able to boot 1000 VM's on a single host, at which point the kernel (Linux 3x) became unresponsive, even if both CPU- and memory usage is nowhere near the limits (48 cores AMD, 128GB mem.) Before this, the booting process became successively slower, after a couple of hundred VM's.

I assume this must be related to the KVM/Qemu driver, as the linux kernel itself should have no problem handling this few processes. However, I did read that the Qemu driver was now multi-threaded. Any ideas of what the cause of this slowness may be - or at least where I should start looking?

Alfred Bratterud
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You are booting all the VMs using qemu-kvm right, and after 100s of VM you feel it's becoming successively slow. So when you feels it stop using kvm, just boot using qemu, I expect you see the same slowliness. My guess is that after those many VMs, KVM (hardware support) exhausts. Because KVM is nothing but software layer for few added hardware registers. So KVM might be the culprit here.

Also what is the purpose of this experiment ?

peeyush
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The following virtual hardware limits for guests have been tested. We ensure host and VMs install and work successfully, even when reaching the limits and there are no major performance regressions (CPU, memory, disk, network) since the last release (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1).

Max. Guest RAM Size --- 512 GB

Max. Virtual CPUs per Guest --- 64

Max. Virtual Network Devices per Guest --- 8

Max. Block Devices per Guest --- 4 emulated (IDE), 20 para-virtual (using virtio-blk)

Max. Number of VM Guests per VM Host Server --- Limit is defined as the total number of virtual CPUs in all guests being no greater than 8 times the number of CPU cores in the host

for more limitations of KVm please refer this document link

Dr. Death
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