On 1/8/19 2:30 AM, Lenny Helpline wrote: > I don't have many commands handy, as we manage almost everything through > libvirt manager. > > 3) create a snapshot of the lined clone: > > virsh snapshot-create-as --domain <VMNAME> --name "test" --halt > > 4) revert the snapshot every X minutes / hours: > > virsh destroy <VMNAME> > virsh snapshot-revert --snapshotname test --running --force > > Does that help?
Yes. It shows that you are taking internal snapshots, rather than external. Note that merely reverting to an internal snapshot does not delete that snapshot, and also note that although qemu has code for deleting internal snapshots, I doubt that it currently reclaims the disk space that was previously in use by that snapshot but no longer needed. Internal snapshots do not get much attention these days, because most of our work is focused on external snapshots. If you were to use external snapshots, then every time you wanted to create a point in time that you might need to roll back to, you create a new external snapshot, turning: image1 into image1 <- temp_overlay then, at the point when you are done with the work in temp_overlay2, you reset the domain back to using image1 and throw away the old temp_overlay (or, recreate temp_overlay to be blank, which is the same as going back to the state in image1); thus, the size of image1 never grows because you are doing all work in temp_overlay, and rolling back no longer keeps the changes that were done in a previous branch of work the way internal snapshots are doing. In libvirt terms, you could create an external snapshot by adding --diskspec $disk,snapshot=external for each $disk of your domain (virsh domblklist can be used to get the list of valid $disk names). But libvirt support for reverting to external snapshots is still not completely rounded out, so you'll have to do a bit more leg work on your end to piece things back together. Asking on the libvirt list may give you better insights on how best to use libvirt to drive external snapshots to accomplish your setup of frequently reverting to older points in time. -- Eric Blake, Principal Software Engineer Red Hat, Inc. +1-919-301-3226 Virtualization: qemu.org | libvirt.org -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1810603 Title: QEMU QCow Images grow dramatically Status in QEMU: New Bug description: I've recently migrated our VM infrastructure (~200 guest on 15 hosts) from vbox to Qemu (using KVM / libvirt). We have a master image (QEMU QCow v3) from which we spawn multiple instances (linked clones). All guests are being revert once per hour for security reasons. About 2 weeks after we successfully migrated to Qemu, we noticed that almost all disks went full across all 15 hosts. Our investigation showed that the initial qcow disk images blow up from a few gigabytes to 100GB and more. This should not happen, as we revert all VMs back to the initial snapshot once per hour and hence all changes that have been made to disks must be reverted too. We did an addition test with 24 hour time frame with which we could reproduce this bug as documented below. Initial disk image size (created on Jan 04): -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.1G Jan 4 15:59 W10-TS01-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.3G Jan 4 15:59 W10-TS02-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.4G Jan 4 15:59 W10-TS03-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.3G Jan 4 16:02 W10-CLIENT01-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.6G Jan 4 16:05 W10-CLIENT02-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.0G Jan 4 16:05 W10-CLIENT03-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.3G Jan 4 16:08 W10-CLIENT04-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.1G Jan 4 16:12 W10-CLIENT05-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.0G Jan 4 16:12 W10-CLIENT06-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.1G Jan 4 16:16 W10-CLIENT07-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.6G Jan 4 16:16 W10-CLIENT08-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.6G Jan 4 16:19 W10-CLIENT09-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7.5G Jan 4 16:21 W10-ROUTER-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18G Jan 4 16:25 W10-MASTER-IMG.qcow2 Disk image size after 24 hours (printed on Jan 05): -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 13G Jan 5 15:07 W10-TS01-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8.9G Jan 5 14:20 W10-TS02-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.0G Jan 5 15:07 W10-TS03-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10G Jan 5 15:08 W10-CLIENT01-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11G Jan 5 15:08 W10-CLIENT02-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11G Jan 5 15:08 W10-CLIENT03-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11G Jan 5 15:08 W10-CLIENT04-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 19G Jan 5 15:07 W10-CLIENT05-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14G Jan 5 15:08 W10-CLIENT06-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.7G Jan 5 15:07 W10-CLIENT07-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35G Jan 5 15:08 W10-CLIENT08-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 9.2G Jan 5 15:07 W10-CLIENT09-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41G Jan 5 15:08 W10-ROUTER-0.img -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 18G Jan 4 16:25 W10-MASTER-IMG.qcow2 You can reproduce this bug as follow: 1) create an initial disk image 2) create a linked clone 3) create a snapshot of the linked clone 4) revert the snapshot every X minutes / hours Due the described behavior / bug, our VM farm is completely down at the moment (as we run out of disk space on all host systems). A quick fix for this bug would be much appreciated. Host OS: Ubuntu 18.04.01 LTS Kernel: 4.15.0-43-generic Qemu: 3.1.0 libvirt: 4.10.0 Guest OS: Windows 10 64bit To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1810603/+subscriptions
