KVM Raw ClientOS Disk over USB2
After getting Windows7 Media Center running in a KVM Virtual Machine a few weeks ago, I’ve been mostly happy … except that the Recorded TV/ folder available it too small.
USB2 Storage
In an attempt to provide more room for these recordings, I created a 388MB raw disk on an external USB2 disk and attempted to add that to the virtual machine through virt-manager. At this point, I’m unsure why it doesn’t work, just that at VM startup, it fails. Removing the 2nd virtio disk from the VM and the client starts without issue.
Physical Space Limits Inside the Server
I wish I had room for another HDD inside the case or room for another external PCI card (either eSATA or more SATA ports are needed). Inside that machine, there isn’t any more physical room for another card due to the way the external disk array HDDs connect to the internal SATA ports.
NFS and Other Networked Storage Options
Other machines here have room to load additional storage and I have a few disks that could easily be added
- 1.5TB 5400rpm
- 0.5TB 7200rpm
- multiple 0.3TB 7200rpm SATA / PATA HDDs
but those other machines run production virtual machines. Adding NFS to the hostOS concerns me just a little. Perhaps a small test NFS share would make sense – 100GB to start. …. looked into running NFS on the other machines here … seems that nobody runs NFS servers on the Xen Dom0 machines. They usually run NFS under a DomU VM to provide access to shared ISOs and other tools for the other VMs. There appears to be a different kernel for NFS, so I’m afraid to even try it on the Xen Dom0 which is running a special kernel, 2.6.24-29-xen, already. NFS is a secondary desire, behind running Xen VMs at this point.
So I’m sorta stuck at this point.
