[CentOS-virt] Can I use direct attached storage as a shared filesystem in Xen

[Ben M.]

Rich wrote:
> I want to make the 10 terabytes raid an xfs filesystem and then share 
> the drive with all 4 of the vm's.  3 of the servers will be samba 
> servers and one will be my Lotus notes server.  I want to make the 
> filesystem /data and then each one of the servers will use specific sub 
> directories.  I have it set up as block devices now but I want the 
> flexibility of having the whole 10 terabytes available to all 4 servers.
> 
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 1:28 AM, Christopher G. Stach II <cgs at ldsys.net 
> <mailto:cgs at ldsys.net>> wrote:
> 
>     ----- "Adam Adamou" <adam0x54 at gmail.com <mailto:adam0x54 at gmail.com>>
>     wrote:
> 
>      > either nfs or ocfs2. nfs is the easiest route. ocfs2 will give you a
>      > clustered filesystem.
> 
>     Except NFS doesn't follow normal filesystem semantics and you can
>     end up with corrupt data without knowing it, and it, along with
>     CIFS, will give you a free shitload of network overhead to go along
>     with your possibly corrupt data. OCFS2 or GFS are the only practical
>     choices if you want it to behave like a typical filesystem and not
>     have to worry about catering to it or rewriting software and/or
>     reeducating developers, and OCFS2 is extremely easy to set up.
> 
>     The original question didn't specify much about the requirements,
>     though. A single shared filesystem? Read-write or read-only? No
>     filesystem at all? Without that information, I would at first
>     recommend not sharing. It can be a lot of trouble, it's usually not
>     required, and it severely complicates life when things fail.
> 
>     Well, there is always XenFS... :/
> 
>     --

Though dated, this article is interesting regarding this thread. The 
article needs to be updated (Last Modified = June 2006), and rewritten 
for CentOS Xen virtualization, but it looks sound upon my first reading:

<http://xenamo.sourceforge.net/>