Speedup your KVM migration in Proxmox^edit

26 Nov 2014

4 mins

If you ever woundered why your 10Gbit link on Proxmox node is used only by a few percent during the migration, so you came to the right place.

The main reason is the security measures taken to protect virtual machine memory during the migration. All volume of memory will be transmitted via secure tunnel and that penalizes the speed:

Nov 24 12:26:41 starting migration of VM 123 to node 'proxmox1' (10.0.1.1)
Nov 24 12:26:41 copying disk images
Nov 24 12:26:41 starting VM 123 on remote node 'proxmox1'
Nov 24 12:26:43 starting ssh migration tunnel
Nov 24 12:26:43 starting online/live migration on localhost:60000
Nov 24 12:26:43 migrate_set_speed: 8589934592
Nov 24 12:26:43 migrate_set_downtime: 0.1
Nov 24 12:26:45 migration status: active (transferred 133567908, remaining 930062336), total 1082789888)
Nov 24 12:26:47 migration status: active (transferred 273781779, remaining 788221952), total 1082789888)

...

Nov 24 12:26:58 migration status: active (transferred 1036346176, remaining 20889600), total 1082789888)
Nov 24 12:26:58 migration status: active (transferred 1059940218, remaining 11558912), total 1082789888)
Nov 24 12:26:59 migration speed: 64.00 MB/s - downtime 54 ms
Nov 24 12:26:59 migration status: completed
Nov 24 12:27:02 migration finished successfuly (duration 00:00:21)
TASK OK

If your configured your Proxmox cluster to use the dedicated network isolated from the public one so you may low down the security level

$ cat /etc/pve/datacenter.cfg
  ....
  migration_unsecure: 1

This is it:

Nov 24 12:42:19 starting migration of VM 100 to node 'proxmox2' (10.0.1.2)
Nov 24 12:42:19 copying disk images
Nov 24 12:42:19 starting VM 100 on remote node 'proxmox2'
Nov 24 12:42:35 starting ssh migration tunnel
Nov 24 12:42:36 starting online/live migration on 10.0.1.2:60000
Nov 24 12:42:36 migrate_set_speed: 8589934592
Nov 24 12:42:36 migrate_set_downtime: 0.1
Nov 24 12:42:38 migration status: active (transferred 728684636, remaining 5655494656), total 6451433472)
Nov 24 12:42:40 migration status: active (transferred 1465523175, remaining 4865253376), total 6451433472)

....

Nov 24 12:42:55 migration status: active (transferred 7115710846, remaining 69742592), total 6451433472)
Nov 24 12:42:55 migration speed: 323.37 MB/s - downtime 262 ms
Nov 24 12:42:55 migration status: completed
Nov 24 12:42:58 migration finished successfuly (duration 00:00:39)
TASK OK