CentOS - Nov 2013 - partitionless installation

Hello All!

I have a lot of virtual machines with KVM hypervizor. For VM's disks I 
use LVM Volumes. It's more suitable to install virtual machines direct 
to the LV-volumes without making partition tables inside the LV.  In 
this case it is very simple to perform online-resizing and mount 
snapshots in host system to perform backups.

So, my question is:

Is it possible to install CentOS 6 without disk partitioning?

-- 
With best regards,
Khalezov Ivan

P.S.  At this time my host OS and virtual machines (guests) are ubuntu 
12.04. Also I want to have some virtual machines running CentOS 6

On 25.11.2013 20:28, ??????? ???? wrote:
> Hello All!
>
> I have a lot of virtual machines with KVM hypervizor. For VM's disks I
> use LVM Volumes. It's more suitable to install virtual machines direct
> to the LV-volumes without making partition tables inside the LV.  In
> this case it is very simple to perform online-resizing and mount
> snapshots in host system to perform backups.
>
> So, my question is:
>
> Is it possible to install CentOS 6 without disk partitioning?
>

-- 
? ?????????,
??????? ????
????????? ?????????????, ????? ?????????? ??
?? ???

I think you are asking if it is possible to install centos virtual
machines without partitioning its LVM block device. I think you do not
want to use any partitioning or LVM within your virtual machine?

Yes, this is possible however it is annoying to make work as, iirc,
the anaconda installer requires partitions. It will not install on a
raw block device.

People have made this work however but I am unsure how.

What will you do about a swap partition?

On 25 November 2013 16:28, ??????? ???? <i.khalezov at rts.ru>
wrote:
> Hello All!
>
> I have a lot of virtual machines with KVM hypervizor. For VM's disks I
> use LVM Volumes. It's more suitable to install virtual machines direct
> to the LV-volumes without making partition tables inside the LV.  In
> this case it is very simple to perform online-resizing and mount
> snapshots in host system to perform backups.
>
> So, my question is:
>
> Is it possible to install CentOS 6 without disk partitioning?
>
> --
> With best regards,
> Khalezov Ivan
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

On 11/26/2013 05:28 AM, ??????? ???? wrote:
> 
> Is it possible to install CentOS 6 without disk partitioning?
Yes, it is, but there are a couple of caveats:

1.  You can't use anaconda to do so directly.

2.  You can't boot through grub (as someone else pointed out).  You can
boot the kernel directly or boot through something similar to grub, such
as pvgrub (for Xen, which I know from experience works with this type of
setup).

I know of two different ways to do it.  The first way is to just do a
regular install to a partitioned image with anaconda, then you can copy
the whole thing over to a non-partitioned filesystem.

The second way is to use yum.  You would have to find a yum package that
runs in ubuntu, then use yum with the --config (for a custom config file
to point to the CentOS repos) and --installroot (to point to your
mounted filesystem, instead of the root of the current host system), and
do something like this:

yum --config=centos6.conf --installroot=/path/to/mountpoint groupinstall
core

Then you can chroot into the new fs (after bind mounting /proc /sys and
/dev) and set your root password, edit your network config
(/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts files) yum install any other packages
you want, and so on.

I recommend that for either method you choose, when yo've tweaked it how
you like for a basic VM, you tarball all the files up and use it as a
template for future installs.

For swap you can either pass in a second block device or use a swap file
(I use a swap file and it works just fine).


Peter