Application Notes Usage and best practices for Device Mapper Multipath with Xen enabled virtual machines for HP StorageWorks Disk Arrays (5697-7828, April 2009)

Advantages:
1. Provides flexibility for dynamic resizing of the volumes
Preparing Xen disk image files for installing Xen virtual machine
1. Create a file system on the multipath device to be used for the Xen disk image file.
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/mapper/mpath8
2. Mount the multipath device
# mount /dev/mapper/mpath8 /home/Xenimage
3. Provide the location of the mount point and disk image file name at File Location text field as
shown in Figure 3.
Advantages:
1. Provides the ability to create sparse disk images which will allocate physical disk space on the
Dom0 as the file is used.
Storage provisioning for virtual machine
Storage can be provisioned through Domain0 which will be available as virtual block devices on the
virtual machine. The storage can be physical devices, logical volumes or disk image files.
The storage at the Domain0 can be mapped to virtual machine using virtual machine manager
(virt-manager).
Steps to configure the storage using virt-manager
1. Start the virt-manager.
2. Select one of the listed guest virtual machine and click Details.
3. Select Hardware and click Add.
Usage and best practices for Device Mapper Multipath with Xen enabled virtual machines for HP
StorageWorks Disk Arrays 9