Monday, March 24, 2008

qemu creation of images

How do you create your images? Do you want to have a BIG file or a SMALL file

qemu-img create debian.img 5G

this creates a large file
which is SPARSE thus is capable of being compressed
via
tar -cjSf debian.tar.bz2 debian.img

which can be moved.

On the other hand you can make a qcow small file to begin with.

qemu-img create debian.img -f qcow 5G

this is a small file.
And can make a copy file to use.

qemu-img create -b debian.img -f qcow stable.ovl

this second is a very tiny copy file, just stores the diffs.