1

virtual disk image - file or partition

view story
linux-howto

http://serverfault.com – 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. When I benchmark a direct-to-partition virtual disk, then format that same partition with ext4, create a virtual disk image stored on that ext4 filesystem, and then benchmark that, I see no speedup at all for the direct-to-partition virtual disk. Instead on some syst (HowTos)

grtyyu's picture
Submitted by grtyyu on 11/13/2012

Stories similar to virtual disk image - file or partition

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.

I need to extend the root partition of a virtual machine (VM) using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) . I can afford a few minutes of downtime so a VM shutdown/reboot is fine.

The virtual hard disk is in qcow2 format but I can translate it to a raw format easily if it helps.

Is it a good idea to use qcow2 format to have a backup image for whole disk with partition table?

I'm not sure that an image with partition table will be able to mount normally and in the same time it will be impossible to run the image in virtual machine because of mess with fstab/mtab / virtual hdd's UUID-s.

I need to clean up some HDD but I will need some of it's content later.

Disk space management problem 43 weeks 4 days ago

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.

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.

Create And Restore Partition Images With Partimage

Backups are usually made in one of two ways - either file-based which means that single files are backed up, often via synchronization and on an external disk, or image-based which means that a whole partition is stuffed into an image file that can be restored on the partition, containing everything there was on it.

Hi Everyone,

I have added new Virtual disk to OS. The main point is I need to bring this whole Disk into LVM control, is it necessary to partition the disk using fdisk command and assign partition type as '8e', or can I directly add that disk into LVM, by running pvcreate command with out creating partition on the disk.

which is the best suggested way of doing this task.

Thanks.

original post

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=12415808

Currently the "partition" of ubuntu is located, is a virtual drive called "boot.disk" and "swap.disk" in a actual partition called D: drive in windows OS.

I have saved my whole hard-disk with dd to an image file. The hard-disk contained some primary partitions formatted with ntfs, swap and ext4.