NTFS on LVM direct - best practice?

jaimito

Member
Aug 30, 2010
22
0
21
Hi,

I'm new to KVM but like Proxmox and have been testing KVM in various circumstances also under CentOS and Ubuntu.

As a result I'm building an XP farm on a new HP DL385 G7. After getting the missing battery for the controller (see other posts by me) I was still seeing somewhat disappointing performance on my first attempt, I have now got quite good results doing the following:

- Using 5 disks, use 2 in RAID1 set for Proxmox
- Use 3 disks in RAID-5 for an LVM volume (no partition)
- Add the LVM as storage from the web interface etc.
- Restore previously-built VMs to the LVM

This seems to give a much more responsive result than my first attempts. As a positive note, the system feels much 'snappier' with the VMs direct on LVM and with the separate storage provision but I'd like to put some numbers to it.

However a few issues have arisen, with which I would like advice.

- I tried to run pveperf on the LVM drives created as above, only to realise 'duh' these are ntfs on LVM.

Have you any suggestions for quantifying throughput? Other than, build an ext2/3 LVM VM volume and test on that?

- Before putting the system into production I am going through the maintenance, testing, and rebuild issues consequent to running directly on LVM. It is (obviously I now realise!) not possible to run e2fschk on the ntfs volumes, and since LVM is not running on an ext2/3/4 partition I can't run it on the underlying filesystem.

I have seen posts elsewhere about using the executables from the ntfs file-system tools. Is this acceptable practice in Proxmox for this issue?


Thanks for any advice!
 

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