[fedora-virt] uniquely identifying drives in virt configurations

Bill McGonigle bill at bfccomputing.com
Thu Feb 4 00:54:05 UTC 2010


Hi, all,

I'm wondering what folks are doing for uniquely identifying plain disks 
in their virtual machine configs.

For instance, I'm trying out the new Xen version and stuck a couple SATA 
drives in a box.  I'd like to use them as physical devices, but not 
break my vm config if I re-cable the drives (or move them to another 
machine).

I could create a degraded RAID mirror, and then reference them by mdX 
and let md worry about the UUID's, but that's ugly.  If I were using 
luks on the drives they'd get tagged and could be referenced uniquely. 
Same with iscsi, those are available uniquely under /sys.

Maybe something with device mapper?  But I'm actually interested in 
benchmarking ZFS through Xen with this, so I'd hate to add another layer 
just for this purpose, since it's only needed at setup time.  I could 
script some ugly hacks but I'd rather not.

I was hoping to find a /sys/block/scsi/model/serialnumber type of thing 
symlinked back to the ../../devices/pci... , but I didn't.  So, I hope 
I'm missing something obvious and folks here have this solved.

Thanks,
-Bill

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Bill McGonigle, Owner
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