Sadique Puthen wrote:
Basically it if you don't pre-allocate the entire image, virt-manager
creates a sparse file to store the guest data which only occupies disk
blocks while you write contents to that sparse file . When checking the
size of the pre-allocated and sparse images, you should use "du", not
"ls -lh".
Thank you for your insight. You are correct.
I have a guest image stored in a file called "subversion".
"du" shows the actual size being used is smaller than what "ls" thinks.
du -a subversion
2158768 subversion
ls -ld subversion
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 64424509441 2007-11-27 18:16 subversion
I have a follow up question though. How do you cleanly backup and
restore these files using the smaller amount of space? Any simplistic
program that I try (e.g. "tar") also thinks my file is 60 Gig not 2 Gig
and creates a real file that uses 60 Gig of actual disk space.
Can anyone share the simple steps with "dd" or other programs that let
you cleanly store a backup of the guest image which uses the smaller
amount of space and also correctly restores from that backup in a way
that preserves the orginal idea of a 60 Gig max guest disk size?
I am sorry if these are just basic Xen or even just basic Unix questions
that you all already know the answers to as opposed to "fedora-xen"
questions but I'm sure I'm not the only one who will run into such
things while trying to virtualize their existing infrastructure using
Fedora and Xen. This low traffic list has been a wonderful asset in
helping with my conversion to Fedora Virtualization. I appreciate all
the help I have received.
--
Thanks,
Aaron
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