On 07/21/2010 01:03 AM, Daniel Herrington wrote:
> Ahh, servers me right for not checking the bios settings. AMD Virtual 
> Extensions were disabled.
> 
> CentOS install took 15 minutes.

Newer versions of Ubuntu come with a `kvm-ok` command which tells you
capabilities and if proper modules are loaded.

As for the file vs. lvm debate, currently I'm using files.  This is mainly so I
can oversubscribe my file systems.  I have very fast drives, but not much space
(4x 15kRPM SAS6 146GB in RAID10).  By creating sparse files, partitioning them
such that inside the guest root is 4GB and 40GB is in an LVM VG, the file on the
host starts at 5GB or so and grows as needed.

Using qcow2 is also an option for this if compression is needed, but affects
performance.

I agree that maintenance on VM guest filesystems is much nicer with LVM, but to
get at the partitions on a guest I use losetup+kpartx:

# losetup /dev/loop0 /kvm/<fqdn>/disk0.raw
# kpartx -a /dev/loop0

Now all the partitions are under /dev/mapper, and I can even run fdisk on
/dev/loop0 if I need to. `kpartx -d /dev/loop0;losetup -d /dev/loop0` to back
out of things.

Jaunty is the oldest version of Ubuntu I would trust with KVM, preferably
Karmic.  I have some Hardy servers that like to panic guests if memory
utilization approaches max.  Hardy also has a bug that causes a crash when fsck
is run in a guest, requiring a manual fsck on the host of the guest filesystem.
 Annoying for ext2 auto-fscks, crashing on boot.  I will be testing Lucid soon.

I also recommend libvirt, which is how the kvm hosts are managed.
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