Sorry, I haven't replied to my thread, but I've been traveling :-).

 

I see this same problem using 5.2 beta on x86_64 dom0 with 32-bit and 64-bit domU guests.

 

For what it's worth, I have 100+ guests with Sparse images and once they are imaged, they seem to perform just fine to me and seem to save 40-80% of the disk space compared with nonsparse images.  So, I see a clear value in using sparse files and having them work.  Moreover, for those of use who don't use GUIs, sparse images are the default for the 'virt-install' tool from RHEL.

 

Now, one thing I have noticed is that the slow formatting only seems to occur duing the install process.  If I attach a 2nd sparse disk to my VM after the install and run mkfs on it, it seems to me to perform comparably to physical hardware.  I just now attached a 150 GB sparse file to a running VM and made a file system on it in less than 2 minutes.  So, at least for me, the problem seems confied to the anaconda install.

 

-Dave.

 

On 4/8/08, Coe, Colin C. (Unix Engineer) <Colin.Coe@woodside.com.au> wrote:

IIRC the 5.2 BETA notes said something about disk IO in general
regarding Xen guests being improved.

CC

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rhelv5-list-bounces@redhat.com
> [mailto:rhelv5-list-bounces@redhat.com] On Behalf Of John Summerfield
> Sent: Tuesday, 8 April 2008 6:05 PM
> To: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) discussion mailing-list
> Subject: Re: [rhelv5-list] Xen Guest Disk Formatting Unfeasibly Slow
>
> Zavodsky, Daniel (GE Money) wrote:
> >     Well you are not doing this in the guest but in Dom0... If you
>
> That's true; my xen system's waiting for someone to fix its kernel:-(
>
> I'll go and sulk in the corner:-)
>
> It shouldn't be slow; has anyone tried it with kvm?
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> Cheers
> John
>
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