KVM: virtualize a single partition
A nice feature in XEN that I miss in KVM is the ability to use a single partition as a disk image. In XEN you can do disk = [ 'file:/dev/vg0/img_root,sda1,r' ] and you can also safely mount /dev/vg0/img_root when the virtual machine is not powered on. With KVM you're out of luck, or at least my googling returned lots of questions and no solutions. Well, there is a not so hard way of working around the issue.