I've had good success using partitions as source drive in KVM. This offers better performance (compared to qcow2 or sparse files) but it does require to do some planning ahead. If possible I use DRBD partition so I can have a hot backup server ready (ideally I would run 2+ VMs on 2 servers, each running half of the VMs and at the same time providing backup for the other node). Plus it's easy to access the guest drive when guest is shutdown using kpartx.

I have been searching the internet for a while now looking for some suggestions or answers regarding KVM installation and disk partitioning best practices for doing the bare metal install host server, and then the disk allocation for the guest OS's. I am completely new to KVM so this new ground for me here. I do have some Solaris background with Zones where we create partition/filesystems for the location where the local zones reside. So I am wondering if there is a suggested guideline for the disk partitioning for deploying KVM on a server.

For example what would be the suggested partitions/filesystem layout of the host server and want space would be allocated for addition of the guests? Your thoughts and feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.

Strangely the KVM web site doesn't really address the suggested disk allocations or layout, nor could I find anything in the Red Hat docs either regarding this topic. So I am hoping we have some KVM experts here that can help me understand some of the ways that your deploying KVM in the server environment. Thanks.

Longsnowsm