On Wed, Jun 01, 2011 at 05:56:02AM +0100, Stefan Hajnoczi wrote: > Partitions are not at the virtio-blk level. The guest operating > system will see the virtio-blk disk and scan its partition table to > determine which partitions are available. The limit then depends on > the partitioning scheme that you use (legacy boot record, GPT, etc).
But practically the Linux virtio implementation imposes a limit of 15 partitions (vda + vda1 .. vda15 = 16), since it encodes the partition number in 4 bits. If you have a virtio disk with more than 15 partitions, Linux guests will ignore the extra partitions. This may or may not matter, but it's worth considering. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into Xen guests. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-p2v