On Sun, 2013-04-21 at 15:04 -0400, Tanstaafl wrote: > ??? > > This doesn't make sense to me. > > Unless you're talking about using LVM on the HOST.
Ah, apologies, I think I had misunderstood. Given that you are using ESXi, I should have thought that LVM on the host wouldn't be possible. Are you set on using ESXi? If not, I think there are some compelling advantages to some of the open source solutions. If so, you are correct that my suggestion about performance advantages wouldn't apply to you. > I'm not. I didn't specify this in this particular post, but I'm using > vmWare ESXi, and installing a gentoo VM to run on it. > > So, I'm asking about using the LVM2 installation manual from Gentoo > and > using LVM2 for just my gentoo VM... > > So, in this case, is it still recommended/fully supported/safe? In this case, I think you may lose some of the LVM advantages. Assuming that a volume resize in ESXi is pretty easy, you won't need the guest to use LVM to take advantage of it. Here's one though, and I'm not sure the answer: can you easily mount an ESXi snapshot somewhere, and make a real backup from it? I use LVM to snapshot my FS, mount that snapshot somewhere, and then I have my backup software back that up instead of the live system. This has the advantage of allowing the backup software to have a consistent view of the disk as it does its work, and gives you sort of a "crash consistent" backup. If you can still do that with ESXi, that's about the only other advantage. As to whether its supported, I'm not an expert of ESXi (so don't count me as an expert), but as far as I know, there should be nothing stopping you from using LVM in the guests. LVM just works with block devices, and the ESXi disks should work like block devices, so everything should be fine. Again, I've never used VMWare very extensively, so this isn't coming from experience. -- Randy Barlow
