Thanks for the suggestions Eric, great stuff and most appreciated.
I will have a play in my sandbox...
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On 2018-05-01 02:31 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
On 05/01/2018 04:17 PM, Paul O'Rorke wrote:
I have been using internal snapshots on production qcow2 images for a
couple of years, admittedly as infrequently as possible with one
exception and that exception has had multiple snapshots taken and
removed using virt-manager's GUI.
I was unaware of this:
There are some technical downsides to
internal snapshots IIUC, such as inability to free the space used by
the
internal snapshot when it is deleted,
This is not an insurmountable difficulty, just one that no one has
spent time coding up.
This might explain why this VM recently kept going into a paused
state and I had to extend the volume to get it to stay up. This VM
is used for testing our software in SharePoint and we make heavy use
of snapshots. Is there nothing I can to do recover that space?
If you have no internal snapshots, you can do a 'qemu-img convert' to
copy just the portion of the image that is actively in use; the copy
will use less disk space than the original because it got rid of the
now-unused space. 'virt-sparsify' from libguestfs takes this one step
further, by also removing unused space within the guest filesystem
itself.
In fact, even if you do have internal snapshots, there is probably a
sequence of 'qemu-img convert' invocations that can ultimately convert
all of your internal snapshots into an external chain of snapshots;
but I don't have a ready formula off-hand to point to (experiment on
an image you don't care about, before doing it on your production image).
What would be the best practice then for a VM that needs to be able
to create and remove snapshots on a regular basis?
In a managed environment, external snapshots probably have the most
support for creating and later merging portions of a chain of
snapshots, although we could still improve libvirt to make this feel
like more of a first class citizen.
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