Installation guide

Logical volumes can be used for disk images and managed using the system's LVM tools.

LVM offers higher performance than file systems because of its simpler block storage model.

LVM thin provisioning offers snapshots and efficient space usage for LVM volumes, and

can be used as an alternative to migrating to qcow2.

Ho st d evices

Host devices such as physical CD-ROMs and raw disks or logical unit numbers (LUNs) can

be presented to the guest. This allows a guest to use storage area network (SAN) or iSCSI

LUNs, as well as local CD-ROM media, with good performance.

Host devices can be used when storage management is done on a SAN instead of on

hosts.

Dist rib u t ed st o rag e syst ems

Gluster volumes can be used as disk images. This allows high-performance clustered

storage over the network.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and above includes native support for creating virtual

machines with GlusterFS. This enables a KVM host to boot virtual machine images from

GlusterFS volumes, and to use images from a GlusterFS volume as data disks for virtual

machines. When compared to GlusterFS FUSE, the native support in KVM delivers higher

performance.

Note

For more information on storage and virtualization, refer to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Virtualization Administration Guide.

Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 6 Virt ualizat io n G et t ing St art ed G uide