[fedora-virt] KVM Virtual machine mounting physical drive

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 03:57:19PM +1000, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> People,
>
> I need to upgrade and I want to start using 64bit hardware that can do  
> KVM but I have a question before I start spending money:
>
> I have been using Fedora since the beginning and regularly upgrade my  
> current hardware with each new version.  To minimise restoring data, I  
> have a pair of drives setup as RAID 1 (ie separate from other  
> partitions) that is used for /home .  So after an upgrade, I simply  
> mount /dev/md0 on /home.  Would I be able to do this from a virtual  
> machine in a new KVM setup?

Yes, virtual machines can access drives directly, so you can export
/dev/md0 on the host into a guest (inside the guest it will see it as
/dev/vdb or similar).

What you can't do is to share any filesystem between the host and a
guest simultaneously, or between guests simultaneously.

In order to do that you have to use a special sort of filesystem,
called a cluster filesystem, for example Red Hat GFS.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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