Greetings - I am a novice system administrator and will soon be purchasing a new server to replacing an aging file server for my company. I am considering setting up the new server as a KVM host with two guests; one guest as the Samba file server and a second guest as a testing area. My old server was set up about 7 years ago and has a 5 disk raid 5 configuration without LVM. I understand the benefits of using LVM and KVM in the right circumstances, but have never used either of them. I have spent a couple of days over the last week trying to understand how to setup a KVM host with guests, but there is an area that I still don't understand; that is the relationship between the underlying raid partitions, LVM, and allocating space to a host and guests. Many of the standard search term combinations in Google don't seem to be getting me anywhere. From what I have read so far I think that I want to have my file server guest using a raw partition rather than an image file, but I haven't found anything with examples or best-practices guidance for partitioning or volume management with hosts and guest VMs. So I am hoping that someone here can give me some pointers, or point me to some clear how-to's somewhere. Any help is appreciated. Thanks. Jeff Boyce Meridian Environmental www.meridianenv.com