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Josh
Asked: 2011-12-30 18:12:42 +0800 CST

Do I need to zero-fill a qcow2 image before compacting it?

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I want to recreate a dynamically allocated qcow2 image in order to shrink it. Is it sufficient that all unnecessary files have been deleted, or do I also need to fill the space formerly occupied by those files with zeros? In other words, is qemu-img filesystem-aware?

qcow2

4 Answers

  1. Yes, you do need to zero-fill the filesystem if you want to recover the space used by deleted files. And no, qemu-img isn't fs-aware.

    I forgot to do this for one VM image I created today (a minimal Debian Sid image for my openstack cloud at work) and it ended up being almost 900MB, even with "-c" for qcow2 compression.

    I recreated it after running "dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/zero ; rm -f /root/zero ; shutdown -h now", and the image size shrunk down to about 335MB. That's a lot less (worthless) data to copy around whenever I start up a new instance.

    there were a lot of deleted files, because the VM started out as debian squeeze and was apt-get upgraded to sid.

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  2. See also: virt-sparsify, an utility which can zero-fill filesystems inside disk images (supporting various formats):

    http://libguestfs.org/virt-sparsify.1.html

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  3. I´m using zerofree ( apt-get install zerofree ) for this task:

    Zerofree finds the unallocated blocks with non-zero value content in an ext2, ext3 or ext4 file-system and fills them with zeroes

    after that you can shrink your image:
    kvm-img convert -O qcow2 original_image.qcow2 deduplicated_image.qcow2

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  4. Personally, I think it works better to clone the disk using Clonezilla or Symantec Ghost. It's a lot quicker than filling up the drive with zeros. Also it avoids the growing the image even more.

    I have done this with Ghost and Win guests countless times. It's actually quicker if "used space" is smaller than those to be zeroed. Also you can use qemu-nbd to mount the images and run Clonezilla from host, avoiding the hassle of Clonezilla-within-guest. Either way it's always much quicker than sdelete/dd in my experience. (Also I often end up with no space available on host for a full zero-out-guest-disk operation, so filling up available space in guest in seldom feasible to me.)

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