HP Integrity Virtual Machines 4.2: Installation, Configuration, and Administration

stores). The VM Host system must have sufficient physical storage for the VM Host and for all
of the virtual machines.
Use the -a option to create and allocate the virtual device to the virtual machine. For example:
# hpvmcreate -a VM-guest-storage-specification:VM-Host-storage-specification
where:
• VM-guest-storage-specification defines where and what storage is seen in the
virtual machine. This is formatted as:
device:adapter-type:hardware-address:
You can specify one of the following devices:
— disk
— dvd
— tape
— changer
— burner
— hba
• adapter-type can be scsi or avio_stor on an HP-UX 11i v2 guest (0505 or later).
• hardware-address or pcibus, pcislot,scsitgt (optional) specifies the virtual device PCI
bus number, PCI slot number, and SCSI target number. If you do not specify this information,
it is generated automatically. HP recommends that you allow the hardware address to be
generated automatically. To omit the hardware address, use the following format (including
two colons):
device:adapter-type::VM-Host-storage-specification
• VM-Host-storage-specification defines where and how the virtual machine storage
is supplied on the VM Host. Specify it using the following format:
storage:location
Where storage is one of the following:
— disk
— lv
— file
— null
— attach
And location is a VM Host system file.
NOTE: AVIO adapter type has the following restrictions:
• Backing store (storage) can be only disk, volume (lv), null, or file.
• Guest device type (device) can be only disk or DVD.
For complete information about constructing storage specifications for virtual machines, see
Section 7.2.2.1 (page 108).
The type of VM Host backing store can affect the performance of the virtual machine. Use the
ioscan command to obtain information about the current device configuration on the VM Host
system, and try to distribute the workload of the virtual machines across the physical backing
stores.
When you share a physical backing storage device among virtual machines. potential conflicts
are not always obvious. For example, if you use a file in a file system on /dev/disk/disk1 as
a backing store, the raw device (/dev/rdisk/disk1) cannot also be used as a backing store.
For more information about specifying virtual devices, see Chapter 7 (page 93).
3.2 Specifying Virtual Machine Characteristics 49