[Gllug] Raw LVM vs. LVM on partitions for KVM

[j.roberts]

Since the question of partitions and LVM has recently been 
comprehensively touched upon, I'd like to ask for comments on whether I 
am doing something stupid, and what the downsides may be.

I am evaluating (for production) a KVM instance running (inter alia) a 
small XP farm with less than 20 instances.

This is for the usual sort of reason: currently critical software at the 
client with dependency on XP and that won't run on Vista or 7 (sigh). 
This is supposed to be rewritten - in the next 3 years.

After much messing around with trying to get aligned partitions (qv lots 
of stuff elsewhere) I have now built a whole lot of VMs directly on LVM 
directly on (hardware) RAID (5 as it happens), NOT building a partition 
first.

I did this to get around alignment issues, but it seems to be very 
satisfactory.

The downside so far to doing this with Windows is that I can't use Linux 
tools to check the VM's consistency etc; with Linux this is not an 
issue. I can only run consistency checks within the VM using Windows tools.

It's not a huge problem since the images are largely static and so I can 
use (backed-up) revertible snapshots to recover from catastrophic 
failure or corruption.

However, I'd like to ask if anyone else is doing anything like this and 
whether there are any other downsides that have not occurred to me (and 
no doubt should have!). If you think I don't quite know what I am doing 
I'd probably agree :)

tia

MeJ

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