[CentOS] Disks for virtualization

Thu Jul 15 15:21:59 UTC 2010
David Dyer-Bennet <dd-b at dd-b.net>

I'm not looking to move virtual machines between physical platforms; just
want some protection between applications sharing a physical server. 
They'll all be using local disk in one form or another.

Much the easiest to manage is just having the virtual machine use a file
in dom0 as its disk.  Without pre-allocating, this lets me over-commit
somewhat to cover unknown future needs, for example.

The alternative seems to be LVM partitions.  Those are easy to throw
around too, but after enough creation / destruction you can end up with
your free-space fragmented so you can't use it, right?

But I imagine there's a performance benefit to LVM partitions over dom0
files.

For things like foswiki for internal use by a development team, and Nagios
monitoring for about a dozen systems, do i need that extra performance?

Does anybody have a rule-of-thumb for the difference?


-- 
David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info