[ale] VM guest partitioning practices

[JD]

On 12/09/2014 11:43 AM, James Sumners wrote:
> I've been asked to research how others layout their filesystems in virtual
> machines. I long ago decided it wasn't worth splitting stuff like /var off onto
> its own partition. I particularly don't think it's necessary in a virtual
> machine. But I need to get some other opinions before I can be validated in mine.
> 
> So, how do you guys partition the filesystems in your virtual machines?
> 

It depends on the machine, workload type, amount of storage needed.
So far, I've only needed 1 or 2 partitions. A second one gets added when the
first is outgrown - perhaps for lots of data under a single directory. I think
I've added a partition to /var/www ... for example.

The hostOS (we use KVM), is setup with a more complex partitioning scheme thanks
to boot, LVM, RAID needs, but inside a VM, I avoid LVM and don't use RAID at
all.  A simple ext4 partition is usually enough.  Adding more storage to a VM is
really easy.


Oh ... and for server VMs with well-known workloads - ZERO swap.

If there are end users on a VM, I'll give them a small partition alone to fill
up. ;)

We don't have large scale storage inside VMs directly.  NFS can be mounted
inside a VM just like anywhere else, so for large data, NFS is the rule.