[ale] Topic ideas for November meeting

[Phil Turmel]

On 11/04/2015 10:34 AM, Horkan Smith wrote:

> Phil, I'm impressed by your setup and it's obviously a much bigger
> part of your workflow than mine is... but I'm missing how the LVs
> help vs using the virtual achine drives.  What am I not seeing?

Well, I started using host LVs as direct VM disks years ago when trying
to squeeze the last ounce of performance out of my VMs.  I had to use an
undocumented virtualbox function for raw devices, but it was worth it.
It also made it convenient to access the VM's partitions when not
running (kpartx).

Since switching to KVM under libvirt, I've been delighted by its direct
support of host volume groups as storage pools.  So setting up a VM is now:

1) tweak a kickstart file in my laptop's VM-facing webserver,
2) Use the virt-manager New VM wizard to pick my kickstart netinstaller
and allocate a virtual disk,
3) Tweak the new VM's network assignment pre-install,
4) Hit go.
5) ssh in after a few minutes.

{The libvirt-kvm-spice-qxl-virtviewer stack just rocks, too.}

Phil