How to Create Virtual Disk without Oracle VM Manager

In some situations, it may be necessary to know how to create a Virtual Disk on OVM 2.2 without using OVM Manager, and attach it to a Virtual Machine.

This can be done in OVM 2.2 via the following process:

1. Log into the Oracle VM server where the VM is running.

2. Change the directory at which the repository is mounted, e.g.:

# cd /to/path/to/repo

3. Create the raw format .img disk image, e.g. initiating 4 GB Virtual Disk:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=newdisk.img bs=1M count=4096

4. Then add new disk image to disk = [ ] section of vm.cfg file of a Virtual Machine. Format:

disk = [ 'file:/mnt/el4u5_64_hvm//system.img,hda,w' ]

Note: Making any change to vm.cfg file effective requires a domain re-creation which is Virtual Machine shutdown then start (NOT restart.)

5. If an outage on the Virtual Machine is not possible, then hot plug read/write as /dev/xvdX by:

# xm block-attach [domain ID] /path/to/image /dev/xvdX w