Chapter 26. Device Mapper Multipathing (DM Multipath) and Storage for Virtual Machines

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 supports DM Multipath and storage for virtual machines.

26.1. Storage for Virtual Machines

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 supports the following file systems or online storage methods for virtual storage:
  • Fibre Channel
  • iSCSI
  • NFS
  • GFS2
Virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 uses libvirt to manage virtual instances. The libvirt utility uses the concept of storage pools to manage storage for virtualized guests. A storage pool is a storage that can be divided into smaller volumes or allocated directly to a guest. Volumes of a storage pool can be allocated to virtualized guests. Following are the categories of available storage pools:
Local storage pools
Local storage includes storage devices, files or directories directly attached to a host, local directories, directly attached disks, and LVM Volume Groups.
Networked (shared) storage pools
Networked storage covers storage devices shared over a network using standard protocols. It includes shared storage devices using Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, GFS2, and SCSI RDMA protocols, and is a requirement for migrating virtualized guests between hosts.
For more information on types of storage pool supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, see the Red Hat Virtualization Deployment and Administration Guide.