[fedora-virt] Virtual Disk Setup

Rich Mahn rich at lat.com
Wed Jul 15 14:12:16 UTC 2009


I am setting up several VMs using an F11 host.  Most of the VMs will
be F11 as well.

>From earlier discussions on this list I recognize that the best
performance for virtual disks is with the backing storage on the host
being a parititon or LV.  Since I want some flexibility I will use
LVs, with virtio disks on most of the VMs.

Here's my questions:

1. Each f11 VM needs three file systems--/boot, root, and swap
   (assuming you can call swap a file system).  Is it better to create
   three LVs (each) on the hosts, and treat it as three separate disks
   on the VMs?  Or is it better to just create one LV on the host and
   then divide up that virtual disk on the VM?

2. Do I get better performance/stability by NOT using lvm on the VMs?
   In other words, just partition the virtio disk and create
   filesystems directly on the partitions?  Or do the wonders of LVM
   and virtio already build in any advantage that might give?

3. Do I get the best performance/stability by creating an LV for each
   disk I need, and then NOT partitioning it on the VM, but using the
   whole disk for a file system.  In other words, use vda, not vda1,
   vda2, etc for the filesystem.  This would give the side effect
   being able to easily mount the filesystem on the host machine when
   the VM wasn't being run.

4. Lastly (for now) are these issues too miniscule in their effects
   that I probably shouldn't even be worrying about them?

Thanks for all the help.

Rich




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