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Re: [Xen-users] Diskspace to DomU

To: xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Diskspace to DomU
From: Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 16 May 2005 02:52:21 +0100
Cc: Jake Stevenson <jake_s@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
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> I am about to setup a new Xen server which will host a few DomU's, one
> of which will be a file server.  The file server will, naturally, have
> quite a lot of disk space and my question is: If my file
> servrer domain uses a lot of disk space and the disks used are on two
> separate controllers, is it possible to dedicate those two PCI-devices to
> the domain and have that domain run LVM or EVMS to manage the disks
> itself instead of exporting a volume through Dom0?

Yes, it is.  You can set up multiple backends for block devices just as you 
can for network.

> And if it is, 
> which is best? Does it yield better performance this way, or should I stick
> with exporting it through Dom0?

It may have slightly better performance (or at least lower CPU utilisation) 
but depending on how heavily loaded the system is, it may not buy you 
anything.

If the CPU on the machine is going to be particularly highly loaded and you're 
going to be using high bandwidth disk IO, you may see some improvement.  I'd 
suggest that in the first instance you set up a test machine with all devices 
driver by dom0 and see if that performs OK.  If the performance is lower than 
it should be, you might like to try assigning devices to the fileserver.

Cheers,
Mark

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