In our development lab, I am installing 4 new servers, that I want to use for hosting KVM. each server will have its own direct attached raid. I'd love to be able to 'pool' this storage, but over gigE, I probably shouldn't even try.
most of the VM's will be running CentOS 5 and 6, some of the VM's will be postgresql database dev/test servers, others will be running java messaging workloads, and various test jobs.
to date, my experience with KVM is bringing up one c6 VM on a c6 host, manually w/ virt-install and virsh...
stupid questions ...
whats the best storage setup for KVM when using direct attached raid? surely using disk image files on a parent ext4/xfs file system isn't the best performance? Should I use host lvm logical volumes as guest vdisks? we're going to be running various database servers in dev/test and wanting at least one or another at a time to really be able to get some serious iops.
its virt-manager worth using, or is it too simplistic/incomplete ?
will virt-manager or some other tool 'unify' management of these 4 VM hosts, or will it be pretty much, me-the-admin keeps track of what vm is on what host and runs the right virt-manager and manages it all fairly manually?
"That may be the easy way, but its not the Cowboy Way"