Convert an unsparse vm image to sparse vm image¶
Few weeks ago, I needed to convert qcow2 image to raw image. So, I executed this command:
qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw vm-foo.qcow2 vm-foo.raw
After that, I had an unsparse image because qemu-img don't output sparse file. I saw this by running this command:
qemu-img info vm-foo.img
or
ls -lksh vm-foo.img
So now, I want to convert this new vm-image to a sparse file, because I want to free space in my file system. As you could know, in sparse file, zero-data, don't takes place in your file system instead of unsparse file.
Moreover, when files are deleted, their data stay in place on the disk (just indexes was deleted).
In my case, i want to optimize my future sparse file vm-image, and I decide to force zero-data in my vm-image.
So, on my started guest, I wrote zero-data as far as possible, using this command:
root@foo# dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/zerotxt bs=1M
root@foo# sync
root@foo# rm /tmp/zerotxt
Now, I shutdown the guest, and convert unsparse file to sparsed file by using cp command:
cp --sparse=always vm-foo.raw vm-foo.raw-sparse
Well done, I got a clean sparse file!
$ qemu-img info vm-foo.raw-sparse
image: vm-foo.raw-sparse
file format: raw
virtual size: 40G (42949672960 bytes)
disk size: 6.3G