HP Integrity Virtual Machines 4.3: Installation, Configuration, Administration

A VM Host storage entity can only be used for one VM device type at a time. For example,
a VM Host CD/DVD drive cannot be used for a Virtual DVD and an attached burner at the
same time.
• location is a VM Host system file.
The file permissions on the VM Host system file are not honored by Integrity VM. VM device
types that support write operations can still do so using a VM Host system file marked read
only. Backing stores provided as virtual disks can be written to regardless of the file
permission settings on the backing store. A backing store provided as a virtual DVD is
always read-. Attached devices do not consider file permissions when backing up data.
More than one VM Host system file might point to the same VM Host storage entity. For
example, if multiple paths to storage are present on the VM Host, more than one disk system
file can point to the same disk. Different VM Host system files change how I/O is routed to
the VM storage resource, but the system files point to the same storage entity. Therefore,
different system files cannot constitute different VM storage resources. A given VM storage
resource can only be specified once to a given virtual machine. Therefore, only one VM Host
system file per VM Host storage entity can be provided to a virtual machine (see
Section 6.2.1.4 (page 99)).
Not all virtual device types support all VM Host storage types (see Section 6.1.4 (page 94)).
Complete VM storage resource statements are discussed in the next section.
6.2.2.3 VM Storage Resource Statements
This section provides information about formulating complete valid resource statements for
Integrity VM storage devices.
To specify an Integrity VM storage device for a virtual machine, use a complete valid resource
statement with the hpvmcreate or hpvmmodify command. The resource statement is a
combination of the VM guest resource specification (described in Section 6.2.2.1 (page 101)) and
the VM Host Storage Specification (described in Section 6.2.2.2 (page 102)). This section provides
examples of complete resource statements for each of the following types of virtual storage
devices:
• Virtual disks
• Virtual LvDisks
• Virtual FileDisks
• Virtual DVDs
• Virtual FileDVDs
• Virtual NullDVDs
• Attachable Devices
A virtual machine can have up to 30 VIO devices or up to 128 AVIO devices total (number of
virtual and attached devices).
The minimum size of a virtual storage resource is 512 bytes for virtual disk and 2048 bytes for a
virtual DVD.
Do not specify the same storage resource, virtual or attached, for the same virtual machine more
than once (see Section 6.2.1.4 (page 99)). Unless otherwise noted, storage resources, virtual or
attached, cannot be simultaneously shared by virtual machines.
All multipath products for storage resources must run on the VM Host; multipath solutions are
not supported in a virtual machine. All multipath solutions used on the VM Host must be in
valid supported configurations before being used for Integrity VM storage resources (see
Section 6.2.1.3 (page 98)).
The resource statements in the following subsections do not contain VM hardware addressing.
The PCI bus, PCI slot, and SCSI target numbers are optional.
6.2 Configuring Integrity VM Storage 103