I am hoping someone can tell me which I should use. I have been doing some Googling, but haven’t found information around which makes more sense in terms of which features depend on which.
I like the idea of ext4 as I like seeing the files themselves and am accustomed to that from working with Hyper-V. When I tried my first XCP-ng install I select the second disk for VMs, but then I had no where I could put ISO files, so I am creating partitions manually then deciding whether they should be ext4 or LVM (1 partition for ISOs, 1 partition for VMs and 1 partition to receive continuous replication).
I plan on using the backup features of Xen Orchestra: both standard backups as well as continuous replication. Are there limitations around these features in relation to LVM or ext4? Does changed block tracking for delta backups work in one an not the other or anything like that? Do snapshots only work with one type and not the other?
I suppose a simpler question would be: Are there any features or capabilities that LVM or ext4 do no support?
All the features are supported with EXT or LVM the big difference is thick vs thin provisioning.
Is there any “easy” way to convert a host local storage to EXT4 without destroying the VMs? Also if a clean install is required would my LVM backups convert or would they be useless? Could they be converted to thin provisioning? My VMs are mostly over sized and I’m running into storage issues especially with backups on top of VM storage. I also have two hosts so could I move the VM to host 2 reinstall xcp-ng on host 1 with EXT4 and move the VMs back? Could that potentially convert them to EXT during the move?
EDIT: In case anyone else for some reason is trying to do this in the future. I moved all my VMs to host 1 and did a fresh install xcp-ng on host 2 and used local EXT SR. Once it was completed I re-added host 2 to the pool and did a live migrate to host 2 and looks like it’s thin provisioned now. There maybe an easier way in CLi, but this was pretty easy.
There is not really any “easy” way to convert the storage, the method you used of moving VM’s to another storage or you could have done a backup / restore works fine.