I may be wrong on this compdoc, but I'm pretty sure it's a pretty bad idea to have the host (Dom0 for me, in Xen) doing anything other than hosting the system for the DomUs. As far as the 'best' setup for your NAS server, it really depends on how much you know about Linux. Openfiler is really nice, but it has some limitations on what you can do as far as access controls. I found it to be to coarse-grained for my uses. In some situations it would work without a problem, I'm sure. I would give it a close look, really. It is very easy to set up and works well. I'm assuming you don't really know a lot more about Linux than I do because you are asking this question. It is really the same place I started. I have been looking at various solutions for quite a while. The last time I looked at Openfiler you could only use the 32bit version as a DomU in Xen. I think they have other images for other virtualization platforms, and I know they have an image for VMWare. FreeNAS really is nice, and I actually prefer the *BSDs to Linux, but depending on what you are looking for as far as ease of use and setup you may find it somewhat less refined than Openfiler. It is definitely not as 'pretty'. I hope this helps. compdoc wrote: >> I need to install a virtual machine acting as a virtual storage server >> > under CentOS 5.x (using kvm, xen, virtualbox or vmware). > > Back when I started using virtual machines, I used guests to share large > storage. > > Eventually, I found it was better to let the host do the sharing of storage, > and let the guests connect to it. > > Seems more efficient that way, as well as helping to facilitate backups and > maintenance. > > > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS-virt mailing list > CentOS-virt at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos-virt > >