[fedora-virt] Fedora virtualization -- comments and questions

Gene Czarcinski gene at czarc.net
Thu Jun 25 14:05:58 UTC 2009


I am a newcomer to Fedora (linux) virtualization.  However, I have been a long 
time user of VMware products running first on Red Hat Linux and then on Fedora.

When I recently acquired a CPU with hardware virtualization support (AMD 
Phenom II 940), I decided to "change my problem set" and give Fedora 
Virtualization a try ... specifically qemu/kvm/etc.

I use virtuals for three purposes: 1) To test software which might destroy a 
system or testing which requires a lot of re-booting.  2) For development 
environment to build rpm packages for various systems, i386/x86_64, etc.  3) 
To run windows.

OK, install the virtualization packages and then install a simple Fedora 11 
guest ... naturally it worked fine.

Now lets get down to real business since I would be installing/running a 
number of virtual systems.  The first thing I found was that configuration files, 
disk images, etc. were scattered but mostly under /etc/libvirt and 
/var/lib/libvirt.  I looked for a runtime parameter which specified where 
things were to be stored but did not find anything.  Furthermore, all of this 
stuff was in the root ("/") partition and, when I upgraded to the next release, 
a pain to bring across.

I have three suggestions (I will put these in bugzilla as soon as someone says 
what package they should be filed against):

1. Put all files (disk images, configuration, etc.) under a single directory 
(easier to manage).

2. Provide a virtualization configuration parameter for setting the top 
directory to be used to store virtualization files (make it easier to get 
things out of root).

3. Do not require DVD/CD ISO images to be in the image directory and do not 
screw with SELinux settings on ISO files.

For those unfamiliar with it, this is more or less how VMware stuff sets things 
up.

So much for wishful thinking, how do I make things easier (and get the files 
out of root)?

OK, what I have come up with is to create a separate partition for all of the 
files and then "bind mount" it to /var/lib/libvirt and /etc/libvirt.

Does this make sense?  Is this going to work? Any other suggestions?

Gene




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