Storage Pools and Volumes

Abstract

libvirt provides storage management on the physical host through storage pools and volumes. Storage pools and volumes can be located on the main host or remotely via NFS mounts on the host. Storage pools are areas of storage set aside to contain volumes. Volumes are directly used by client domains for file system storage and are formatted by the client domain. A volume can contain any type of domain client partition type(s) and is controlled strictly by the domain client. A volume is always a member of a single storage pool. However, a domain can have access to multiple client volumes as long as none of those volumes is shared with any other active client domains; this is because there are no facilities in libvirt to share volumes between domains.