Its probably bad sport to answer my own challenge - "I'd be interested in hearing about any other features that may be lost with using this model.", but here goes anyway...
I've spoken with a few customers who work in environments where the linux administrator does not have rights to create and resize the virtual hard drives. This obviously shoots my recommendation of 1 filesystem per vmdk. At this point I'm really glad I said I like LVM in the previous post. 😉
In this case, I think Andrew's recommendation is spot on. The key is that the LVM needs to be properly aligned (each physical volume in LVM2 terms)!
So, Andrew's formula might look like this:
disk.vmdk (two partitions with starting offsets (in sectors) divisible by 8)
For simplicity sake, one might consider the following:
boot.vmdk (usually 256MB, a single partition starting at 64 sectors)
lvm.vmdk (size depends on applications hosted, no partition table)
Please keep a few other things in mind:
1.) Any additional vmdk that you add to the LVM must be properly aligned (simply use the whole device = aligned).
2.) Some utilities may not work with guest filesystems under LVM control.
Hope this helps,
-Eric
