I am playing with virtual hosts in Fedora 12, trying to install various versions of Windows, various distro of Linux, and some other OS. One problem is that I don't always know how much disk space is need for each of the OS. Some may change the disk usage after install, for example, online update for Windows.
How do you decrease or shrink the size of a KVM virtual machine disk?
I allocated a virtual disk of 500GB (stored at /var/lib/libvirt/images/vm1.img), and I'm finding that overkill, so now I'd like to free up some of that space for use with other virtual machines. There seems to be a lot answers on how to increase image storage, but not decrease it.
I have my pc with dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. I have a a partition of 62 GB on which I created a Virtual Hard Disk Image using VirtualBox from within Ubuntu and Installed Joli OS. After I uninstalled Joli os and uninstalled Virtual Machine, I still Can not recover the disk space that was occupied by the Virtual Disk Image though I am unable to find the Virtual Disk Image.
We use a StarWind SAN which has the concept of thin-provisioned disks that grow as needed. You can allocate a 4TB drive but it starts off tiny and grows as blocks are written to the virtual disk (via iSCSI).
The virtual disk used for our main file system has grown to 1.5TB and has plenty of virtual space left (2.5TB) but disk space on the SAN is another matter - it's getting a bit tight.
I'm looking at the differences between using a file versus a partition to store a virtual disk image in VM use. The common knowledge is that partition-based images are faster than file-based images because of a decreased overhead. It makes sense, but I've never seen any actual numbers.
My own testing bears out a different result.
Minimum system
requirements
for Xubuntu (...)
5 GB of disk space
With Lubuntu, you can use computers with even less memory.
I read the above as Xubuntu and Lubuntu both requiring a minimum of 5 GB free disk space.
I have an image of an existing partition generated with dd if=/dev/sdXN of=image.bin. Now I want to use this image as the basis for a virtual machine. I know how to convert the image into a format that VirtualBox can use.
The problem is that the "disk" image is really just the image of one partition and thus does not contain an MBR or a partition table.
hinto wrote:Depending on you Windows license, you can always turn your real Windows partition into a virtual disk and run it as a guest, while #!
I have been having some trouble setting up my virtual machine with windows 8 professional edition via VirtualBox. After allocating RAM and Hard Disk space I attempted running the Windows 8 setup from an iso disk image and after about 30 seconds of sitting at the bootup screen I get an error and it tells me that my pc needs to restart. Could this be an issue with windows 8 support?