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Re: [Xen-users] Best way to convert pv to hvm?

To: Tony Hoyle <tmh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Best way to convert pv to hvm?
From: Tim Post <tim.post@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:06:10 +0800
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On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 10:39 +0100, Tony Hoyle wrote:
> Petersson, Mats wrote:
> > I know this doesn't help the actual question you have, but: Why would
> > you want to move from PV to HVM? It is decidedly not the "right"
> > direction to go in my opinion (and I have no political reason to say so,
> > rather the opposite, as I only do HVM development). PV is faster than
> > HVM, so why would you want to move to HVM?
> > 
> It's not HVM that's the issue (just simplifies the question) just the 
> requirement
> for a complete disk image rather than separate partitions.  It frees me to 
> switch
> between technologies - at the moment Xen isn't usable for my situation so 
> I'll be
> temporarily using VMWare with an eye on future Xen development or possibly
> Kvm when it matures.  Once you have the image you have the ability to switch 
> with
> only driver/environment issues to worry about.
> 
> Tony
> 

Tony, this is probably best accomplished scripted utilizing lomount.
Actually the proper way to do it would be design an application to do it
and talk to ioctl directly.

Its not really just a Xen tool then, its a tool for Virtuailzation in
general which is, well, lomount.

I was saying there's no elegant tool to do it, I didn't mean to imply
there isn't an elegant *way* to do it. The ideal version of what you
describe is a 'no brainer' to use and 'just works'.

Given that in either direction you shoot yourself in the foot, I still
can't see how it would be useful. PV guests don't do so well with sliced
VBD's. Likewise , as you said keeping a copy in sync to go to HVM isn't
very practical.

Even thinking of throwing network storage in to help abstract the
problem, I can't come up with a good way. I don't like iscsi on dom-0,
and I don't want to set my AOE_SHELVES back to 16, nor do I want aoe-1
and aoe-2 running together to serve the purpose. 

But, the idea of what you describe would be neat. So please don't think
I'm saying its a bad idea. Its a good idea, just every way to implement
it seems bad, unless you had some other ideas?

Now your question makes a LOT more sense to me. Sorry for the confusion
on my part :)


Best,
--Tim

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