[Xen-users] Xen, RAID, LVM, XFS

[Nuno MagalhÃes <nunomagalhaes@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm experimenting with Xen as a means to take full advantage of my
hardware and to test different OSse and their interoperability.

The hw is as follows:
    ASUS M2NPV-VM board with BIOS rev5005
    AMD Phenom II X4 910e CPU
    8GiB RAM, DDR2 800
    4 SATA drives (2 identical 1TB, another TB, one 160GB)
    Radeon HD 5450 PCI (and the onboard NVidia GeForce 6150)

I believe the only device with an IOMMU is the Radeon, but i haven't
fully groked that yet.

I intend to set up the 2 identical drives as a 1TB RAID1 (software),
and add that to the other two drives under LVM.

I'm using XFS for dom0 / (well, i haven't installed the hypervisor
yet, it's still the stock linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 as i'm still traversing
dmesg and solving some issues) in the 1TB drive; and don't intend to
use XFS for guest filesystems. I've read around[1][2] that barriers
may be an issue under Xen, but i'm not sure how accurate/fresh this
information is. There also seemed to be an issue with LVM and
barriers[3] but that is apparently solved[4]?

I'm also reading[5]  about RAID+LVM and how RAID chunks relate to LVM
data alignment. While this is not stricktly Xen-related, are there any
caveats i should be aware of?

I'm running stable, which at the moment has Xen 4.1 (4.3 is in
unstable) and i'd rather keep the dom0 as stable, if possible. The
dom0 is Debian, the domUs will be GNU/Linux, *BSD and MS Windows. This
is mainly a test system, i won't be running anything mission-critical.
However, i *would* like to use a domU as my desktop system, with
something like XDMCP+(PulseAudio or Jack or any other sound server
that will enable be to watch audio/video in sync and without lag).

Thanks for any useful tips, experience sharing, caveat+pitfall
prevention and good RTFM material.
Nuno

[1] 
https://anothersysadmin.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/xen-xfs-and-the-barrier-error/
[2] http://oss.sgi.com/archives/xfs/2009-02/msg00455.html
[3] 
http://grokbase.com/t/centos/centos/09c91je62e/xfs-and-lvm2-possibly-in-the-scenario-of-snapshots
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Volume_Manager_%28Linux%29#Caveats
[5] http://wiki.tldp.org/LVM-on-RAID

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