[libvirt-users] Questions about qcow2 file size management

[Jérôme]

Le 2015-10-14 12:09, Sven Schwedas a écrit :
> On 2015-10-14 11:34, Jérôme wrote:
> 
>> In other words, can I have this on a 60Go drive?
>> total 53G
>> 7,4G -rw------- 1 root root 11G oct.   8 06:34 prod_151008.qcow2
>> 7,4G -rw------- 1 root root 11G oct.   9 06:37 prod_151009.qcow2
>> 7,5G -rw------- 1 root root 11G oct.  10 06:41 prod_151010.qcow2
>> 7,5G -rw------- 2 root root 11G oct.  11 06:49 prod_151011.qcow2
>> 7,5G -rw------- 1 root root 11G oct.  12 06:44 prod_151012.qcow2
>> 7,5G -rw------- 1 root root 11G oct.  13 06:27 prod_151013.qcow2
>> 7,7G -rw------- 1 root root 11G oct.  14 06:55 prod_151014.qcow2
>>
>> (Total allocated is 53 < 60 but sum of 11G sizes is 77 G.)
>>
>> If so, then I guess I get the point.
> 
> Yes. You just might need to figure out what to do if VMs suddenly start
> to need more storage after all.

Sure. I don't think I'll do this, but I wanted to be sure I understood
the mechanism correctly.

Thanks for the confirmation.

>> 2/ Backup size
>>
>> Is there a simple way to do backups that only take the actual allocated
>> space (7,7 G in my example) instead of the max (10 G)?
> 
> I believe the mechanism you're searching for is sparse file handling.
> Both rsync and cp can copy sparse files correctly; rsync does not do it
> by default (--sparse), and cp's man page indicates that its automatic
> sparse file detection is buggy (but manually specifying --sparse=always
> should work).

Exactly. I missed the "sparse" keyword for my research.

I modified the cp and rsync commands in my backup script and now I get
sparse files copied as sparse files, so my backup space won't get filled
with zeros.
 
>> 3/ Playing with allocated space
>>
>> My VM apparently has an allocated size of 7.7 G
>>
>> 7,7G -rw------- 1 libvirt-qemu libvirt-qemu  11G oct.  14 10:04
>> prod.qcow2
>>
>> However, loging into it shows much less than 7.7 G is used:
> 
> TRIM is needed to indicate that space is reclaimable. This needs file
> system support (no fat32, e.g.), and support by QEMU('s I/O driver).
> Once Qemu is set up to accept TRIM, you can either enable the discard
> mount option, or set up an fstrim cron job.

OK, I think I get the idea. I'll dig into this.

Thanks !

-- 
Jérôme