[fedora-virt] Install Guest\HD Q?

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Sat Jun 6 11:27:57 UTC 2009


On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 12:01:50PM +0100, Frank Murphy (Frankly3d) wrote:
> Is it possible to assign a full *physical drive*
> to each guest.

Yes, it's possible.  Not necessarily advisable though.

> If I need one for F11, F11, Rawide
> the first two being update in line with releases.
>
> Do I set this up while installing  the host OS?
> Best Recommended?

I'm not quite clear what you want, but: Assuming you have a PC with
four physical drives installed, then you can have the host on one of
them (probably /dev/sda is best).  During host OS installation, leave
/dev/sd[b-d] untouched.  Then in virt-install or virt-manager you can
select to install the guest using /dev/sd[b-d] as their main drive.

*Inside the guest* the drive will appear to the guest as /dev/sda.

The reason we don't do this normally is that it's incredibly
inflexible.  What happens if one guest needs more disk space?  Get
your screwdriver out and replace that drive?

A better solution is to treat all four drives as 'storage', combine
them together using RAID and/or LVM, then use LVM to partition out
flexible chunks of space for the host and each guest.  LVM allows you
to resize guest logical volumes[1] to cope with future requirements.

Rich.

[1] Particularly expanding -- shrinking is a bit more of a problem.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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