Installation guide

Note
Live and offline migrations require virtual machines to be installed on shared network
storage. For information on setting up shared storage for virtual machines, refer to the
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Virtualization Administration Guide.
a. Wit h t h e d ef au lt lo cal st o rag e
Select the Create a d i sk i mag e o n the co mputer' s hard d ri ve radio
button to create a file-based image in the default storage pool, the
/var/l i b/l i bvi rt/i mag es/ directory. Enter the size of the disk image to be
created. If the Al l o cate enti re d i sk no w check box is selected, a disk image of
the size specified will be created immediately. If not, the disk image will grow as it
becomes filled.
Note
Although the storage pool is a virtual container it is limited by two factors:
maximum size allowed to it by qemu-kvm and the size of the disk on the host
physical machine. Storage pools may not exceed the size of the disk on the
host physical machine. The maximum sizes are as follows:
virtio-blk = 2^63 bytes or 8 Exabytes(using raw files or disk)
Ext4 = ~ 16 TB (using 4 KB block size)
XFS = ~8 Exabytes
qcow2 and host file systems keep their own metadata and scalability
should be evaluated/tuned when trying very large image sizes. Using raw
disks means fewer layers that could affect scalability or max size.
⁠Chapt er 7 . Inst allin g a Red Hat Ent erp rise Linux 6 guest virt ual machine on a Red Hat Ent erprise Linux 6 host
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