2008 Apr 25 - Fri
Running VMWare with LVM on Linux
In order to get a slight speed boost out of an OS resident in a VM, the hosted OS can be
made to use raw disks or partitions.
On my computer, I use Linux's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) to manage my partitions.
VMWare doesn't know how to decode those types of partitions.
I first looked to
vmware-bdwrapper
as a work around. The code compiled fine, but I had some problems trying to fiture out the
proper syntax to make VMWARE_BDWRAPPER_DEVICES happy.
I then gave
vmgbd a try. This is a VMWare generic
block device patch. This one worked much easier. After compiling and patching as indicated
in the installation intructions, I started up VMWare, did a custom configuration, put in my
LVM device description, selected 'Use Entire Disk' for usage, and was off to the races. The
caveat at this point is that I had to run VMWare as root. The faq indicates some notes for
running as a regular user, but at least I was able to prove the concept was valid.
As a side note, here is a
A Beginner's Guide To LVM.
Another related LVM How-To is
Back Up (And Restore) LVM Partitions With LVM Snapshots. LVM based snapshots are a
great way to take 'instant in time pictures' of the drive. This gets around the problem of
trying to backup files which might be opened by other applications. Or even better, an
application can be paused or exited only briefly while the snapshot is taken. Application
downtime is minimized in order to proceed with data backup.
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