Virtualized Storage Devices; 8.1. Creating A Virtualized Floppy Disk Controller - Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5 - VIRTUALIZATION GUIDE Manual

Chapter 8.

Virtualized storage devices

This chapter covers installing and configuring storage devices in virtualized guests. The term block
devices refers to various forms of storage devices. All the procedures in this chapter work with both
Xen and KVM hypervisors.
Valid disk targets
The target variable in libvirt configuration files accepts only the following device names:
• /dev/xvd[a to z][1 to 15]
Example: /dev/xvdb13
• /dev/xvd[a to i][a to z][1 to 15]
Example: /dev/xvdbz13
• /dev/sd[a to p][1 to 15]
Example: /dev/sda1
• /dev/hd[a to t][1 to 63]
Example: /dev/hdd3

8.1. Creating a virtualized floppy disk controller

Floppy disk controllers are required for a number of older operating systems, especially for installing
drivers. Presently, physical floppy disk devices cannot be accessed from virtualized guests. However,
creating and accessing floppy disk images from virtualized floppy drives is supported. This section
covers creating a virtualized floppy device.
An image file of a floppy disk is required. Create floppy disk image files with the dd command.
Replace /dev/fd0 with the name of a floppy device and name the disk appropriately.
# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=~/legacydrivers.img
Para-virtualized drivers note
The para-virtualized drivers can map physical floppy devices to fully virtualized guests. For
more information on using para-virtualized drivers read
Drivers.
This example uses a guest created with virt-manager running a fully virtualized Red Hat Enterprise
Linux installation with an image located in /var/lib/libvirt/images/rhel5FV.img. The Xen
hypervisor is used in the example.
1. Create the XML configuration file for your guest image using the virsh command on a running
guest.
Chapter 12, KVM Para-virtualized
135