Is it possible to assign a full *physical drive* to each guest.
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?
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.
On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 12:27:57PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
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.
Forgot to say there's an additional twist here. It won't affect you with F11+ guests [see bug below], but might affect people installing older versions of Fedora or other Linux distros.
LVM doesn't support having two volume groups with the same name. Normally not a problem, but if you insist on using whole physical drives, and if the guests have the same volume group name as each other or the host, that can cause serious problems.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=207470 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461682
Another reason why using whole physical drives is a bad idea ...
Rich.
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
LVM doesn't support having two volume groups with the same name. Normally not a problem, but if you insist on using whole physical drives, and if the guests have the same volume group name as each other or the host, that can cause serious problems.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=207470 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=461682
Another reason why using whole physical drives is a bad idea ...
May look at the LVM setup then for the 3 Guest Drives. Leave SDA for the host, with unique names.
Aside: Can Virt-Manager\kvm manage ReactOS as a guest http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
Frank
On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 02:01:54PM +0100, Frank Murphy (Frankly3d) wrote:
Aside: Can Virt-Manager\kvm manage ReactOS as a guest http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
No idea, but do let us know how it goes.
Rich.
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 02:01:54PM +0100, Frank Murphy (Frankly3d) wrote:
Aside: Can Virt-Manager\kvm manage ReactOS as a guest http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
No idea, but do let us know how it goes.
Rich.
Will do
On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 06:42:56PM +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
On Sat, Jun 06, 2009 at 02:01:54PM +0100, Frank Murphy (Frankly3d) wrote:
Aside: Can Virt-Manager\kvm manage ReactOS as a guest http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html
No idea, but do let us know how it goes.
ReactOS works well for me virt virt-manager/kvm.
I only have to use pcnet network card emulation, because other (also default) network cards have no driver in reactos.
May be this will be a good feature enhancement requirement to add virtio driver to reactos. :) I can install KVM virtio driver, just it's not functional (no IP detected).
After each restart reactos is trying to install "PCI Memory" driver, which is not present. What is it? Can I disable this device in virt-manager?
SAL
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Frank Murphy -
Ján ONDREJ (SAL) -
Richard W.M. Jones