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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:11:24PM -0400, Gene Czarcinski wrote:
> On Thursday 25 June 2009 10:28:50 Gerry Maddock wrote:
> 
> 1.  All of my Fedora systems are multiboot systems with a small (minimal 
> install) Fedora as a "boot selector" and system to define striped LVM logical 
> volumes (which anaconda does not support).  Each system has at least two disk 
> drives (they are pretty cheap these days).  There are multiple swap and /boot 
> partitions defined.  The remainder of the disk space is put into a single LVM 
> volume group.
> 
> 2.  Basic rule: "do not screw with a working system!" ... Only do fresh 
> installs.  NEVER upgrade.  This was a hard lesson to learn but it keeps me out 
> of trouble,.
> 
> 3. Each system has four /boot partitions and four "/" logical volumes (named 
> root1-4) ... think of these as old, current, next, and testing.  /home and 
> other data are put into separate logical volumes.  One of these separate 
> logical volumes has been used for VMware Virtuals.  I keep what goes into a 
> "/" (commonly referred to as "root" in Unix/Linux) to just software, etc. for 
> a specific version of a system (e.g., Fedora 10, Fedora 11, Fedora 12, etc).  I 
> expect all other stuff to be in separate partitions or LVM logical volumes 
> which I can mount on my new system.
> 
> 4.  After installing a "new" system such as when Fedora 12 is released, I want 
> to do a minimum of work copying over stuff from the old system to the new 
> system.

All these points just say you want some kind of config mgmt tool.
In keeping config files in /etc/, libvirt is no different to most
other apps. You could bind mount /etc/libvirt elsewhere if you
really felt you needed to.

> 5.  With the current "libvirt" setup I have disk images under 
> /var/lib/libvert/images and the guest's configuration under /etc/libvirt/qemu.  
> Furthermore, I now have an application which can chew up a lot of disk space 
> and all of it coming out of the "/" logical volume.  I currently size my "/" 
> logical volumes to handle a lot of software plus a good amount of temporary 
> storage ... BUT I do not have 150GB "/" partitions/logical-volumes!

That directory isn't compulsory. It is the default location with correct
SELinux labelling, but you can ad other directories using 'semanage', and
in very latest libvirt, we automatically relabel disks suitably, no matter
where they are located.

> As far as SELinux goes, I read (somewhere in documentation) that a) iso images 
> had to be under /var/lib/libvirt/images and that b) the SELinux context values 
> would be set to "virt_image_t".  This may not be the way the software actual 
> works but this is what is described in some related documentation.

Since Fedora 11 there should be no need to label files yourself

Daniel
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