KVM Virtualization Partition-Based Storage Pool Configuration
External
Internal
Overview
This article explains how to expose a pre-formatted block device partition as storage pool, using virsh.
Do not use this procedure to configure an entire disk as storage pool. Follow this procedure for that Disk-based Storage Pool Configuration.
Procedure
Create a new partition to be exposed as the local storage pool. Use fdisk. For this example, the partition will be referred to as /dev/sda7.
Create a file system on the newly allocated partition, as described in mkfs.xfs or mkfs.ext4:
mkfs.xfs /dev/sda7
Create a new storage pool definition:
virsh pool-define-as main-storage-pool fs --source-dev /dev/sda7 --target /main-storage-pool
More details on the pool-define-as command in virsh pool-define-as.
Verify the new pool:
virsh pool-list --all Name State Autostart ------------------------------------------- main-storage-pool inactive no
More details on the pool-list command in virsh pool-list.
Build the pool and create the mount point. More details here virsh pool-build.
virsh pool-build main-storage-pool
Start the storage pool. This command mounts the filesystem onto the mount point created during the previous step. More details here: virsh pool-start.
virsh pool-start main-storage-pool
Configure the storage pool to start at boot. More details here: virsh pool-autostart.
virsh pool-autostart main-storage-pool
Restart the virtualization host and make sure the filesystem is mounted after the restart and the storage pool is active, with pool-info:
virsh pool-info main-storage-pool