Installation guide

Chapter 9. Virtualized storage devices
This chapter covers installing and configuring storage devices in virtual machines. The term block
devices refers to various forms of storage devices. All the procedures in this chapter work with both
Xen and KVM hypervisors.
Important
The target variable in libvirt configuration files accepts only the following device names:
/dev/xvd[a to z][1 to 15]
Example: /dev/xvdb13
/dev/xvd[a to i][a to z][1 to 15]
Example: /dev/xvdbz13
/dev/sd[a to p][1 to 15]
Example: /dev/sda1
/dev/hd[a to t][1 to 63]
Example: /dev/hdd3
9.1. Creat ing a virt ualized floppy disk cont roller
Floppy disk controllers are required for a number of older operating systems, especially for installing
drivers. Presently, physical floppy disk devices cannot be accessed from virtual machines. However,
creating and accessing floppy disk images from virtualized floppy drives is supported. This section
covers creating a virtualized floppy device.
First, create an image file of the floppy disk with the dd command. Replace /dev/fd0 with the name
of a floppy device and name the disk image appropriately.
# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/legacydrivers.img
Note
The para-virtualized drivers can map physical floppy devices to fully virtualized guests. For
more information on using para-virtualized drivers see Chapter 13, KVM Para-virtualized
Drivers.
This example uses a guest created with virt-manager running a fully virtualized Red Hat
Enterprise Linux installation with an image located in /var/lib/libvirt/images/rhel5FV.img.
The Xen hypervisor is used in the example.
1. Create the XML configuration file for your guest image using the virsh command on a
running guest.
⁠Chapt er 9 . Virt ualized st orage devices
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