I/O slowness cause: bad default settings
So, we can state that to obtain good I/O throughput from the QCOW2 format, two conditions must be met:
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don't use a write-through cache
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always use metadata preallocation.
However, using the virt-manager GUI interface that is normally used to create virtual disks and guest systems on Red Hat and Fedora, you can not enable metadata preallocation on QCOW2 files. While the storage volume creation interface let you specify if you want to preallocate the virtual disk, this function actually only works with RAW files; if you use a QCOW2 file it does nothing.
To create a file with metadata preallocation, you must open a terminal and issue the “qemu-img create” command. For example, if you want to create a ~10 GB QCOW2 with metadata preallocation, you must issue the command “qemu-img create -f qcow2 -o size=10000000000,preallocation=metadata file.img”.
Moreover, the default caching scheme is the write-through one. While generally the guest creation wizard correctly disable host-side cache, if you later add any virtual disk to the guest, often the disk is added with the “default” caching policy – a write-through one.
So, if you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora Linux as the host operating system for you virtualization server and you plan to use the QCOW2 format, remember to manually create preallocated virtual disk files and to use a “none” cache policy (you can also use a “write-back” policy, but be warned that your guests will be more prone to data loss).