Advanced Storage and Networking Features - Getting Started with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization - page 131

Hot plugging and removing virtual hard disks
To add an additional virtual hard disk to a running guest, use the following steps:
1. Log in to the Administrator console, navigate to the Virtual Machines resource
tab, and select the appropriate virtual machine.
2. Navigate to the Disks tab from the bottom pane of the selected virtual machine.
3. Click on Add ; this will open an Add Virtual Disk window.
4. Enter the size of the disk and make sure that the disk interface type is selected to
Virtio not IDE . Full virtualization is a nice feature because it allows you to run
any operating system virtualized. However, it's slow because the hypervisor has to
emulate actual physical devices, such as RTL8139 network cards or IDE disks.
5. Virtio is a virtualization standard for networks and disk device drivers, where just
the guest's device driver knows that it is running in a virtual environment and co-
operates with the hypervisor. This enables guests to get high performance network
and disk operations, and give most of the performance benefits of paravirtualiza-
tion.
6. Fill in rest of the relevant fields as we did when we added a virtual disk to the vir-
tual machine, and click on OK .
7. For a couple of seconds, the newly added disk will be in the Locked state before
changing to the Deactivated state.
8. Select the newly added disk, and click on Activate .
9. Now you can log in to the guest operating system, and use the disk utility ships
with the operating system to configure the new disk.
In the same way, we can also hot remove disk attached to the guest operating system. To re-
move the virtual hard disk online, perform these steps:
1. Deactivate the disk that is to be hot removed.
2. Finally, select Remove to remove it permanently.