Image or LVM?

[kvman]

I'm wondering is there much of a performance difference between the host using a disk image and the host using LVM for KVM virtual machines? Disk images seem to be easier to use and the virtual disk can be backed up simply by copying a single file but does LVM have better disk i/o performance?

Also I have a server with hardware raid and when I install Proxmox VE it seems to partition the whole disk which then doesn't leave me any space to create LVM storage. Is there a way of specifying how much disk space Proxmox should use so I can leave space to create an LVM group for VMs after installation? Or do I need to create two hardware raid containers before installing so Proxmox only uses one and I can then add an LVM group on the other after installation?

 

[liska_]

In my comparison the difference was between 5-10%, not a big deal for me. But i was comparing iscsi+lvm vs nfs+image, so maybe on local storage there will be bigger performance boost.

It would be better to use separate disks for data and proxmox. Anyway, you can resize your data partition, then decrease that lv and add the volumegroup with free space to storages.

 

[kvman]

Thanks liska_

I might do some tests on a dummy system before changing our existing setup!