Had my first encounter of Linux, or specifically, a linux-like environment in a corporate environment. The IT peops were trying to setup an environment on Xenserver, and they had setup a storage space to copy a virtual machine image onto. But they kept running out of space. It took me a while to figure out what they were doing (wrong), though.

They were trying to copy onto the PV partition, and Xenserver had setup its environment to use LVM, so the PV partition was already allocated to the LVM system, and therefore had no space to copy onto.

After figuring out which LV was the one they wanted to use, I had problems mounting, with mount saying I had to specify the filesystem. After trying various switches with mount and specifying a filesystem (only NFS, ext, ext2 and ext3 were supported by Xenserver. No vfat, ntfs or btrfs. Admittedly, however, the Xenserver version the IT people were using was an older version), I soon found out that the IT people had created the storage space, but not done anything else. Therefore, that would explain why I couldn’t mount it – it hadn’t been formatted. So a simple mkfs.ext3 (remember ext4 wasn’t supported) on the block device in /dev/mapper/ meant I could mount it without specifying filesystem. scp’ing into the server and copying into the path proved it worked.

Related articles

• Optimising Xenserver (aedwardsitblog.wordpress.com)
• Installing Citrix XenTools 6.2 on CentOS Linux release 6.0 (Final) from command line (gunnalag.com)
• Xen Launches The Mirage Cloud OS (techweekeurope.co.uk)
• Xenserver - RAID monitoring (community.spiceworks.com)
• Lvm (wiki.archlinux.org)
• Difference between ext2, ext3 and ext4 filesystem in linux (adarsh5388.wordpress.com)
• File Systems (wiki.archlinux.org)