[Xen-users] Best practice for presenting disk to (HVM) RHEL DomUs?

[Robert Sturrock <rns@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have an existing RHEL4 DomU here that I'd like to present some extra
to.  An extra pair or 146G SCSI drives have been made available in the
Dom0, and I'm trying to work out how best to present them entirely to
a single DomU.

Ultimately I want the disks to be setup as a Software mirror and
mkfs'd into a single ~140GB partition.  Can people recommend the best
way to do this to yield good I/O performance?

I'm not sure whether I should make the software mirror on the Dom0 and
then present /dev/mdX to the DomU (assuming this is possible).  Or
should I just present the raw disks straight to the DomU and let the
DomU handle the mirroring?

As a first stab at this, what I've done is the latter and configured
things like this:

    disk = [ 'file:/var/lib/xen/images/domu.img,hda,w',
             'phy:/dev/sdd,ioemu:hdb,w',
             'phy:/dev/sde,ioemu:hdc,w' ]

.. then on the DomU, run:

    mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hdb1 /dev/hdc1
    mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

I'm not sure that this is best (or fastest, it seems quite slow) - any
suggestions?

Dom0 is RHEL5 (64-bit).  DomU is RHEL4 (64-bit), HVM virtualized.

Cheers,

Robert.

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