I've been able to do this both ways with libvirt/kvm. You have to define your logical volume as a block device. I the example below (I use virsh to create the VM), I created logical volume "my_lv" in volume group "host" and was able to both install an OS into it and copy (via dd) a raw image into it. Resizing the logical volume is easy, but you still have to resize the guest file systems to allow the guest to make use of the additional space (or give up the space if reducing the size) <disk type='block' device='disk'> <source dev='/dev/host/my_lv'/> <target dev='sda' bus='scsi'/> </disk> Don Morrison scar <scar(a)drigon.com&gt; Sent by: To libvirt-users-bou libvirt-users(a)redhat.com nces(a)redhat.com cc Subject 04/23/2010 06:03 [libvirt-users] Using the host's PM LVM to manage virtual disks -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 i am envisioning a scenario that a fellow sysadmin is employing using xen, where the host is configured with LVM. basically, one volume group spans the physical disk. then, various logical volumes are created for the host and (Linux) guest OSes. this makes it easy to resize logical volumes should it be needed. is a setup like this possible with libvirt? the best i can think up, so far, is to create a new logical disk, vm1, and pass that as an argument to the -f option of virt-install. then, during the installation i can setup LVM within the guest. not sure if this would even work if i need to expand the volume size. first i would expand the size of vm1. then, within the vm1 OS i would expand the size of the root partition. i would like to not have to use this second layer of LVM. for example, on the host OS, i would create two logical volumes: vm1-root and vm1-swap, and these are what vm1 would use for root and swap. then, if needed, i can just increase the size of vm1-root, etc. thanks _______________________________________________ libvirt-users mailing list libvirt-users(a)redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvirt-users