Thanks for all the info. I have one follow up. On Wed, 2009-05-13 at 10:07 +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > > > As I install software onto a system I want to preserve its > state--just > > the disk state---at various points so I can go back. What is the > best > > way to do this? > > > > LVM snapshots. Read up on the 'lvcreate -s' command and option. I may have been unclear. I meant as I install software on the VM. Since some of them are running Windows, they can't do LVM. I am running LVM on my host Linux system.
Or are you suggesting that I put the image files on a snapshottable partition? Over time the snapshot seems likely to accumulate a lot of original sectors that don't involve the disk image I care about. Or do you mean I should back each virtual disk with an LVM volume? That does seem cleaner; I've just been following the docs and they use regular files. They say I can't just use a raw partition, but maybe kvm-img -f qcow2 /dev/MyVolumeGroup/Volume10 ? Does that give better performance? The one drawback I see is that I'd have to really take the space I wanted, rather than having it only notionally reserved for a file. I'm not sure how growing the logical volume would interact with qcow... Ross -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
