I have an unusual need which will be best met by running a VM on my IPFire box. It’s great that IPFire allows this with libvirt/qemu!
Being a bit perfectionist I went to the trouble of making space for a dedicated partition to store the VM. However, it seems that IPFire does not have the necessary “backend” (kernel driver??) to support a pool on a physical disk device!
When creating a new storage pool of type “disk: Physical Disk Device” with Source Path: “/dev/sda6” (my empty partition) I get the error:
Error creating pool: Could not define storage pool: internal error: missing backend for pool type 4 (disk)
Can anyone confirm that this is expected?
If so, why has IPFire not included this module? (I imagine to simplify things and reduce size/support, but it would be very helpful if anyone can confirm)
I have an active vm on my firewall running ldap and some other server processes (flexlm license server, other minor services). I found it easier for a lot of reasons to just use a qemu-img file (qcow2). Unless you are storing a lot of data (active database?), it doesn’t make sense to have a dedicated partition for this.
I don’t use libvirt on IPF, but occasionally do on my openSUSE workstation. There, I simply mount the partition holding VM to /var/lib/livirt/images - YMMV with IPF.
There is a case for a separate partition if the main system is on SSD. At the very least, the “nocow” option is desirable for the folder/partition holding VM or the “write-life” of an SSD could be seriously reduced.
@bonnietwin thank you for confirming the option was specifically removed. That’s helpful to know.
My system uses and SSD and I’m concerned about its lifetime. I also mentioned that I’m a perfectionist and there’s a slight performance improvement in using a separate partition. The VM I’m running has a small but frequently updated database.
Anyway it doesn’t really matter. I’ve just been using the default libvirt directory and there’s no issues.