[Discuss] LVM vs File system file for KVM Virtual Machines?

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

I'm in the LVM-is-better camp, and don't have a whole lot to add given that
the major points have been addressed.

But here's one suggestion I've always given to people who work with me: 
rather than leaving it to hearsay, run your own benchmarks.  VMs are cheap, so
build two and run your favorite benchmarks to see if you can measure a
difference.

Don't know of one?  Try this one, it's a trusty easy-to-compile standby:
http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/

I found that with Virtualbox running under a Linux 2.6 host, LVM was
substantially faster than bare metal (hard to explain other than that there is
some write-through caching going on at the host O/S level).

-rich