[SATLUG] Xen Image vs Partition

[Tweeks]

On Tuesday 01 April 2008 10:27:06 am Sean I wrote:
> Does anyone have any experience with file backed xen servers vs
> partition backed xen images?  Or does anyone have any good links to
> comparison testing (I have googled and read a bunch I was just curious
> with personal experience).  We are debating which to go with for our
> testing environment, File backed would be so much easier to clone but
> if the performance suffers greatly they will not be worth it.
> Personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Partition based is much faster..  However.. if you want the best of both 
worlds.. decide how much disk space that you can give up to ALL of the Xen 
VMs you would ever want, and partition off that much of your drive as a 
single LVM partition.. and then set up LVM2.  This will allow you to slice 
and dice it at will.. wipre, reallocate, etc.. never touching fdisk again for 
your VMs.. it's blazingly fast, but with all the flexability of file based.

If you've never done LVM before.. here's a pointer in the Xen context that I 
mentioned:
	http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8812

Tweeks