Hi all, I want to setup a fileserver as a KVM which will access a 2TB disk partition to store its data. In order to do this I saw 5 options:

  1. Attach the whole disk to the VM and access the partition as you do in the host machine. -> contraindicated by the RHEL documentation for security reasons.

  2. Attach only the partition to the VM. Inside the VM, the partition appears as a drive which needs a new partition table. This seems good to me (for reasons I’ll explain later), but I don’t know how the partition-table-inside-a-partition thing works and what implications it comes with.

  3. Create a sparse max-2TB qcow2 image, store it in the physical partition and attach it to the VM. -> rejected by me because the partition inside the qcow2 image needs constant resizing as your storage needs grow.

  4. Create a fully initialized 2TB qcow2 image. -> current way of doing it, no resizes, no security concerns (I guess). The only drawback I perceive is the time required to initialize a 2TB image (~2.5hours in an HDD).

  5. Use the physical partition as NFS. I haven’t really investigated this solution -nor am I experienced with NFS- but to me it seems like it will require some configuration in the host too, which is something I want to avoid because I don’t want to redeploy the host in case shit hits the fan.

So, why 2 seems good to me? Neither resizes as in 3 nor long setup times (image initializing) as in 4.

Is there any other solution that I have missed? If not, out of these, which should I choose?

Sorry for the long, I tried to be as detailed as possible.

  • AzadiOP
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    1 year ago

    You could set it up to expand if it hits some low disk space threshold

    That’s a good idea, I can be proactive about some things, e.g. it won’t get suddenly more than 30GB of data, so I could maybe resize it once the free space is ~50GB. I’ll look into it, thanks!