I am trying to learn about libvirt external snapshotting of VM qcow2 images. I think I prefer this vs internal snapshots where the snapshot lives inside the qcow2 file because the qcow2 file grows rapidly with each snapshot and even if you delete a snapshot inside the image file you can't recover that space to reduce the image file, that I've discovered..
External snapshots at least give some more control over disk space; however, the downside is that while external snapshots can be easily created, there is no integration yet in virt-manager, nor does virsh revert work with external snapshots. So, manual methods are needed to revert a VM image from an external snapshot. At least this is how I understand things so far.
Curious if anyone is already doing external snapshots of their VMs, and how that has been working out? I have written a recipe for creating external snapshots, just need to work on how to revert from an external sn.
I have read this page on the topic.
https://wiki.libvirt.org/I_created_a...ert_to_it.html
My thought is it would be good to keep a few snapshots on hand in case I break something in a VM, and since my backup process will always overwrite the previous backup of an image, there is a chance I could backup up a broken VM and have nothing viable to revert to. A few snapshots would help in this case I think.
My KVM host is ext4-LVM and my VMs are qcow2 images.
Hmmm, could LVM snapshots be an option because all my VMs are in their own logical volume. Hmmm ?
External snapshots at least give some more control over disk space; however, the downside is that while external snapshots can be easily created, there is no integration yet in virt-manager, nor does virsh revert work with external snapshots. So, manual methods are needed to revert a VM image from an external snapshot. At least this is how I understand things so far.
Curious if anyone is already doing external snapshots of their VMs, and how that has been working out? I have written a recipe for creating external snapshots, just need to work on how to revert from an external sn.
I have read this page on the topic.
https://wiki.libvirt.org/I_created_a...ert_to_it.html
My thought is it would be good to keep a few snapshots on hand in case I break something in a VM, and since my backup process will always overwrite the previous backup of an image, there is a chance I could backup up a broken VM and have nothing viable to revert to. A few snapshots would help in this case I think.
My KVM host is ext4-LVM and my VMs are qcow2 images.
Hmmm, could LVM snapshots be an option because all my VMs are in their own logical volume. Hmmm ?