Don’t use LVM in a Xen guest
I’m using a Fedora Core 6 host and have installed a Fedora Core 6 guest. I’d like to mount the guest’s main disk image, but I can’t get at the data since the guest uses file-backed virtual disks and LVM is used within those disks.
Xen is interesting. Xen is still pretty unstable, but is and continues to become more impressive.
Lesson learned: don’t use LVM in both host and guest. Especially when both are default Fedora Core 6 installs.
I keep seeing “LVM with Xen is a good idea” on mailing lists and even in the user manual. This is probably true where maximum flexibility and control are desired. But freedom has a price: simplicity (and perhaps a little performance). Plain old partitions are simple. I miss ‘em, and I’m going back!
For that matter, I’m sure SELinux is great and all, but there are some gotchas when using it with Xen. For instance, images must be installed into /var/lib/xen/images or something.