[CentOS] Install CentOS as KVM guest

[R P Herrold]

On Thu, 28 Apr 2011, Emmanuel Noobadmin wrote:

> Thanks for pointing out that it really is abnormal because 
> it takes about 2 hours for virt-install to create a 190G 
> disk for me.

As you are having issues with the install, I might suggest 
creating a more modest sized disk image, at least during 
testing --- It would be a rare test case that would need more 
than 8 G for a CentOS image while you are still solving setup 
issues

We have supported guest images up to 400G for one user who 
kept re-sizing an image up and up from an initial 4G to over 
400 G ... eventually the 2 1/2 hour lag in moving content from 
one big image to another bigger image caused him to ask why it 
was taking so long. When our interface 'resizes' an image, 
it takes a safety snapshot first to an NFS backup store, 
tests is, and only then deletes the old image and creates the 
old one ... so it takes a while for images over say 100 G.

The delays you note do not surprise me -- it takes time to 
reliably shuttle bits around a disk, and no cacheing effects 
are possible with off the shelf setups (i.e., lacking huge 
memory based drives) to support such large image sizes

-- Russ herrold