[ale] LVM and Xen

[Jeff Hubbs]

Andrew Grieser wrote:
>
> The Xen guides (and default configuration) seem to favor exporting partitions / disks, so that's what I had been using. It seems that local files may be easier to work with though. How do you establish the size and/or grow a file?
Something like

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/aux/dom1.ext2 bs=1048576 count=25000 # make a 
~25GiB file of zeros
    mke2fs /aux/dom1.ext2 # format it as though it were a block device

I never saw any point to using any journaling filesystem at that level, 
although I suppose experiment might show some improvement for certain 
domU usages especially if you can explicitly disable journaling.  It's 
the dom0 where you care about journaling, and needless to say, the 
filesystem used - as well as the whole disk subsystem - has to be very, 
very solid.  On my Xen server, it was easy to back up domUs by shutting 
the domU down, bzip2ing the domU's file, and copying it off somewhere.