Re: KVM - Qcow2 image size behavior

[Jakob Bohm]

On 25/09/2019 17:05, Julianno Nogueira wrote:
> Hello everyone! I would like to thank you all for the project and the 
> tool developed across these years. I am a fan of yours! This is very 
> important to make the new technology era a better and open place to 
> work and live with!
>
> I´m facing a weird listing image file behaviour (or at least I think 
> It is), that have a 500GB Qcow2 image:
>
> [root@server /]# qemu-img info 
> /var/lib/libvirt/images/netvoltcloudserv.img
> image: /var/lib/libvirt/images/netvoltcloudserv.img
> file format: qcow2
> virtual size: 500G (536870912000 bytes)
> disk size: 489G
> cluster_size: 65536
> Format specific information:
>     compat: 1.1
>     lazy refcounts: true
>
>
> - The Image size is 500GB, and that´s correct and exacly what I have 
> set up.
>
> Now the problem is when I ls this image:
>
> [root@server /]# ls -la /var/lib/libvirt/images/
> total 512593892
> drwx--x--x.  4 root root            75 Set 16 22:46 .
> drwxr-xr-x. 10 root root           117 Jun 20 12:04 ..
> drwx--x--x.  2 root root            29 Jul  5  2018 discos_virtuais
> -rwx--x--x.  1 qemu qemu *1010408555008* Set 25 11:51 netvoltcloudserv.img
> drwx--x--x.  2 root root             6 Set 16 22:46 nsf-pool-1
>
> *- The size of this image is 1TB!*
>
> *So my question based on this, is: *
>
> - Is this a "bug" or "expected" behavior?
> - Who to "fix the size" or make SISOP see it correctly (with 500GB)?
SYSOP should know that most modern file systems (including the one 
containing
your/var/lib/libvirt/images/ directory) support the feature known as "sparse
files", wheresome parts of a file are not actually stored, but are treated
as all zeroes when read. On unix/linux the true disk use can be seen with
the standard utility "du" .  On Windows, the resource kit tool diruse can
usually show this info.

In your case qemu itself claims the file only uses 489G of disk space, but I
don'tknow if that corresponds to the reality as reported by the command

du -ha /var/lib/libvirt/images/

As for qcow2 specifically, the format allows some qcow2 clusters (each 
64K in
yourimage) to be such sparse clusters, and this is often the default when
creating newqcow2 image files.

Finally note that the virtual disk size seen by your virtual machine (in 
this
case500GB) may be less or more than the apparent size and actual disk use of
the qcow2 file.

A qcow2 file contains at least the following: The non-zero clusters from the
virtual disk,snapshots of that image created via the libvirt snapshot
commands, copies ofthe virtual machine ram (if included in snapshots of a
running machine), andmetadata to keep track of where all this is in the
qcow2 file.



Enjoy

Jakob
--
Jakob Bohm, CIO, Partner, WiseMo A/S.  https://www.wisemo.com
Transformervej 29, 2860 Søborg, Denmark.  Direct +45 31 13 16 10
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