G’day,

We’ll be moving VMs that aren’t already using Virtio for their Network Card away from hardware emulation and over to virtualised networking. This should help to improve performance by removing the need to emulate.

Here’s some key info from https://wiki.libvirt.org/Virtio.html

“So-called “full virtualisation” is a nice feature because it allows you to run any operating system virtualised. However, it’s slow because the hypervisor has to emulate actual physical devices such as E1000/E1000E network cards for instance. This emulation is both complicated and inefficient.

Virtio is a virtualisation standard for network & disk device drivers where just the guest’s device driver “knows” it is running in a virtual environment & cooperates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network & disk operations, and gives most of the performance benefits of paravirtualisation.”

Our crew will also take the opportunity to assign an IPv6 /96 per-server, so your clients can go dual-stack!

We should be able to avoid power cycling any VMs, and are aiming for 1-3 minutes max impact per service.

Cheers,
Merlot Digital