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I'm messing around with KVM and different storage options for sharing between virtual machines. I have an LVM volume group defined as a storage pool for libvirt. I've defined a volume and attached it to two test VMs as a virtio disk. Here's virsh dumpxml

<disk type='block' device='disk'> <driver name='qemu' type='raw'/> <source dev='/dev/kvm_storage/vm_shared'/> <target dev='vda' bus='virtio'/> <shareable/> <alias name='virtio-disk0'/> <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x05' function='0x0'/> </disk>

I can read/write files, but they do not stay in sync between the two virtuals unless I unmount then remount. Is this even supported?

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  • I built I high availability system, albeit several years ago, using two machines sharing a volume group. Our caveat was that only one machine could import and make active the volume group at a time. Don't recall if the second could be made read only or not. I would suggest one serve via nfs or samba and the other use,mount as client. Commented Aug 7, 2013 at 11:38

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You need an clustered file system.

I do not know what filesystem you are using. But with a standard file system this is not possible and has nothing to do KVM or LVM.

An other solution would be to use a network filesystem like nfs or cifs.

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  • or use smb samba to be compatible with Windows VMs. Commented Mar 11, 2022 at 6:03
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You have to use those levels :

On physical Host :

  • KVM level : second disk for VM marked as "Shared storage" in Virt-manager properties (only disk type "raw" is supported. qcow2 is not supported as "shareable" in vm disk edit screen and virt-manager will not allow you to click "apply" when you tick the "shareable" box)

On VMs :

  • level 0 : DLM (like disk logical management I think) # service dlm start ; Linux packages to install
  • level 1 : LVM management
  • level 2 : GFS2 filesystem formatted on your LVM logical volume
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A disk used by a vm at the same time.Otherwise,the filesystem on the disk will be damaged! You can use NAS/NFS/SMB etc network filesystem to share files.

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