Re: [Xen-users] VM accessing Hosts hard disk

[Tim Post <tim.post@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2006-12-23 at 23:31 -0500, Thomas Miller wrote:
> I want to be able to have a shared drive that the VMs can access from 
> the host machine.
> 
> Basically I have downloaded install files from the internet into a 
> directory on the host and would like to copy them to the VM to run vs 
> re-downloading them from the internet.
> 
> Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
> 

Do the guests need to be able to write to this shared storage? Or is
this a read only need?

Just plain old NFS on an ext3 file system can accomplish what you
described if I read your need correctly.

If they need to also write / update this shared storage, you'd do much
better with using a cluster FS like ocfs2. GFS would work but is a
little more tricky to get working. ocfs2 has a really simple and
(almost) idiot proof configuration.

If you give a little more info the list can point you to specifics of
either way. 

One word of warning that I can share, avoid using file backed VBD's for
shared storage, they seem to break 100x more often vs using
partition/lvm backed vbds when more than one guest is reading (or
writing) to it.. regardless of the FS type in use.

Also, what OS are your guests using , how about dom-0?

Best,
-Tim



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