Re: Use entire device for partitioning during installation

[Patrick <patrickd vmware com>]

On Fri, 11 Sep 2009, Tim Edwards wrote:

> We're currently using LVM devices as the disks for Xen VMs. The LVM
> volume (say /dev/xenvolumes/vm01_datadisk) will come through in the VM
> as a normal disk (say /dev/hdd).

> What we'd like to do is have our kickstarts create a filesystem on
> /dev/hdd without first creating a /dev/hdd1. I can do this manually
> (mkfs.ext3 /dev/hdd; mount /dev/hdd /somewhere) after the install but is
> there a way for kickstart's partitioning to do this? Alternatively would
> it work to try and do it in the %post section in the kickstart?

I did something like this for the ESX installer (Weasel) to make our 
version of kickstart work with virtual disks.  There is a 'virtualdisk' 
command which sets up the virtual disk where all of the Console OS 
partitions are created (ie. /, /var/log, swap, etc.), and also the 'part' 
command takes a flag called '--onvirtualdisk=' which then specifies the 
volume on which the partitions are created.

The difference in our case is that the Console OS is attached when the 
machine boots, so you end up with all of your normal system mount points 
(except /boot) residing inside of the virtual disk.  What ends up being 
kind of neat about it is that you can install multiple copies of the OS 
onto the system and just point the machine to use whichever virtual disk 
you want the system directories to come from.  It's basically a multi-boot 
machine without the clutter of having different partitions on the physical 
disk.

--Patrick.