[CentOS] KVM Questions

Sat May 9 03:28:47 UTC 2015
Paul R. Ganci <ganci at nurdog.com>

I have a system with two CentOS 7.1 guests. When I created the VMs I did 
not have enough storage space in the default location 
/var/lib/libvirt/images so I moved the default location to a directory 
/home/vmimages. While this configuration is functional I regret creating 
a new storage pool in /home. I would like to create a separate partition 
to place the VM images removing them from their present /home/images 
location. The /home partition is presently empty other than the VM 
images directory so I can easily steal space from it (using only ~4% of 
500GB). However, I have a problem. Namely /home is an XFS file system so 
I cannot shrink the partition in order to make space for the desired new 
VM images partition. I was wondering if this procedure might work to do 
what I desire:

1.) Shutdown the VMs
2.) Archive the VM image directory /home/vmimages to a network drive 
(don't have space locally other than on /home)
3.) Use parted or fdisk to delete present /home partition
4.) Use parted or fdisk to re-create smaller/home partition and new 
/vm-images partition
5.) Create XFS file system on /home and /vm-images
6.) Extact VM image directory archive into /vm-images
7.) Use virt-manager to change default location of images to /vm-images

Is there any chance that after all this the VMs would actually start up 
again especially after a re-boot?

Thanks.

-- 
Paul (ganci at nurdog.com)
(303)257-5208