Hi, virt-sparsify is definitely going to make the shrinking of qcow2 images less annoying, but it still produces a new disk image and requires downtime for the vm.
The other tools in guestfs look very interesting as well, they will make life a lot easier. Thanx for the tip Rob 2013/8/20 Jim Fehlig <[email protected]>: > Rob Verduijn wrote: >> Hello all, >> >> I'm looking for a clever way to shrink qcow2 images. >> > > Thanks for all the info you provided in this thread! > > I'd like to add that virt-sparsify, virt-resize, and the other virt-* > tools in the guestfs-tools package are also useful for manipulating images. > > Regards, > Jim > >> what I do now is : >> >> 1 in the vm delete the files I don't need (tempfiles, spoolfiles, >> junkfiles, etc, etc) >> 2 fill the empty space with zeros >> dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=1024k ; sync ; rm bigfile ; sync >> 3 shut down the vm >> 4 convert the qcow2 to a fresh new qcow2 >> qemu-img convert -c -O qcow2 orig.qcow2 shrunk.qcow2 >> mv orig.qcow2 orig.qcow2.bak >> mv shrunk.qcow2 orig.qcow2 >> 5 test the vm >> 6 delete the backup if it works >> >> Now this is fine if you got plenty space and just want to tidy up a >> bit before it turns bad. >> >> But what if there is no space, and adding extra partitions is not that easy. >> (imagine an offsite, far off location that is a real pain to get into >> due to serious security hassle) >> >> Or if you are me and are seriously annoyed by the cumbersome exercise >> above and have a gut feeling that there should be a more elegant way >> (preferably one without downtime) >> >> The above exercise requires to be done on all the partitions of the >> qcow2 image if there is more than one, adding to my irritation of the >> exercise. >> >> Does anybody have any ideas on a more elegant solution ? >> >> cheers >> Rob >> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] To contact the owner, e-mail: [email protected]
