[ale] LVM2 & VirtualBox Help.

[Ed Cashin]

On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Jack Schneider <puck at dp-indexing.com> wrote:
...
> Hi, Ed
> That's worth some thought..  Can you say more about "the trouble"?  My
> thinking was that it, RDA, kind of isolates the guests from my dubbing
> around on the host, and the flexibility to adjust the sizes/structure
> of guests as needed and reuse the disk space flexibly.. Hell! I may
> even try Win7....8-) NO WAY, Jose!  Thanks!

Sure.  Files have always been flexible---a named sequence of bytes,
basically.  Traditionally, block devices have not.  LVM and md have
changed that, but still, it seems like the nice thing about virtualization
is freeing the computer services from the underlying hardware.  So
by using a static mapping between the hardware and the VMs, you're
giving up some of that flexibility.

After all, a file can be copied anywhere without trouble, but with a
block device there can be unforeseen complexities.  A funny example
is the way disk manufacturers will make different disks with the same
model numbers.  Two disks with the same exact model numbers can
have a slightly different number of sectors.

When there's a performance gain, a more static arrangement can
be a good option, but when the gain isn't important, I find files easy
to work with.

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
  http://noserose.net/e/
  http://www.coraid.com/