[Libvir] Next features and target for development

[Till Maas]

On Mi Juli 11 2007, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> I'm interested to know how VirtualBox / VMWare deal with disk storage.
> Do they provide their own storage subsystems which support this or do
> they interact with things like LVM?

The use their own subsystem. VMWare uses .vmdk files to store the harddisk 
contents. When a snapshot is created, it creates a new one that depends on 
the old one and stores every change in the new one. When the machine is 
running during the snapshot, the complete state of the machine is stored, 
too. I guess VirtualBox does it similiar.

Qemu also provides this feature, except that afaik it is only possible to 
savely create snapshots of powered off machines with the qcow2 image type. 
With qemu-img one can create a new disk image that depends on an old one and 
every changes are written to the new one. But maybe it is also possible to do 
this with running machines, when one suspends them, creates the new qcow2 
image and starts the machine again, but I have never tried this.

Regards,
Till