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Re: [Xen-users] DomUs and hard disks

Luis Roberto Romano wrote:

According to the documentation I've read, there's 2 ways to make the virtual disks for DomUs storage:
1 - Image-based disks.
2 - LVM disks

But, I was wondering if I can assign a regular partition (e.g sda1) to a DomU, instead of a LVM.

I'm guessing you've read a few "here's a recipe for doing Xen" pages and those are the only options used by the authors ?

You have great flexibility in assigning devices - you can assign a partition (eg sda3), a whole disk (eg sdc), and LVM lv (eg vg0/domuroot), and I assume (but I've not tried it) an MD raid device (eg md/domuraid). Oh and lets not forget iSCSI volumes where you get pretty well the same options (you can pass the entire device or a partition on it).

As already said, using LVM just makes life so much easier as you can dynamically create/resize/remove volumes as your DomU needs change. For that reason, with only two exceptions*, all my DomU volumes are LVM LVs. * One is an iSCSI volume at work, the other is a video storage disk on my MythTV system at home where I've given the guest an entire disk to itself.

What you do is really down to your own preferences. There are tradoffs - eg managing lots of LVM LVs in Dom0 and using "one filesystem per disk" in DomU vs managing just one per DomU and partitioning it within the DomU.

--
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.

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