Hi Redhat Team,

 

Thanks for the information on QCOW2

 

On ISCSI storage domain, if am creating a floating disk with “raw” + “sparse”. Then it gives me an error that this is not a valid format for this storage domain type.

<disk>

  <storage_domains>

    <storage_domain id="834df3ca-b9c2-45d3-ade9-6384dc1517da"/>

  </storage_domains>

  <name>mydisk</name>

  <provisioned_size>400</provisioned_size>

  <format>raw</format>

  <sparse>true</sparse>

</disk>

 

Response

 

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>

<fault>

    <detail>[Cannot add Virtual Disk. Disk configuration (RAW Sparse) is incompatible with the storage domain type.]</detail>

    <reason>Operation Failed</reason>

</fault>

 

On further digging I found a already opened BZ for it

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1600547

Is this going to be fixed in the near future ?  

 

Right now, it creates only COW disk if thin provisioning is chosen.

 

From: Nir Soffer <nsoffer@redhat.com>
Date: Thursday, November 15, 2018 at 10:25 PM
To: devel <devel@ovirt.org>
Cc: Suchitra Herwadkar <Suchitra.Herwadkar@veritas.com>, Mahesh Falmari <Mahesh.Falmari@veritas.com>, Daniel Erez <derez@redhat.com>, "Nisan, Tal" <tnisan@redhat.com>, Pavan Chavva <pchavva@redhat.com>, Raj Asher <Raj.Asher@veritas.com>, Himani Vaidya <Himani.Vaidya@veritas.com>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [BACKUP] Estimating qcow2 disk image size before upload

 

When uploading to qcow2 disks on block storage you must set the disk initial_size

correctly so the system allocates big enough disk. If the initial size is too small, the

upload will fail when trying to write after the end of the device.

 

This info can be useful for people working on a backup solution for oVirt.

 

The easiest case is upload of existing qcow2 image using the SDK. In this case we

create a new disk with:

 

    initial_size=image_size,

    provisioned_size=virtual_size,

 

image_size is the size of the file:

 

    os.stat('image').st_size

 

Note that "qemu-img info" return "actual-size" - this is the allocated size on storage

which is not helpful for uploading images.

 

Example:

 

A more tricky case is when a backup system keeps raw guest data, but know how

to generate qcow2 image stream, without creating a temporary image.

 

In this case the required size can be calculated by counting the number of 

clusters that need to be allocated in the final image. This depends on the

location of the data in the image.

 

For example this creates 1G image with only one cluster:

 

$ python -c 'with open("one-cluster.raw", "wb") as f:

    f.truncate(1024**3)

    f.write("x")'

 

$ ls -lhs one-cluster.raw 

4.0K -rw-rw-r--. 1 nsoffer nsoffer 1.0G Nov 15 18:24 one-cluster.raw

 

$ qemu-img measure -f raw -O qcow2 one-cluster.raw 

required size: 458752

fully allocated size: 1074135040

 

$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 one-cluster.raw one-cluster.qcow2

 

$ ls -lhs one-cluster.qcow2 

324K -rw-r--r--. 1 nsoffer nsoffer 384K Nov 15 18:25 one-cluster.qcow2

 

 

But this creates a fully allocated 1G image:

 

$ python -c 'with open("fully-allocated.raw", "wb") as f:

    f.truncate(1024**3)

    for i in range(0, 1024**3, 64 * 1024):

        f.seek(i)

        f.write("x")'

 

$ ls -lhs fully-allocated.raw 

64M -rw-rw-r--. 1 nsoffer nsoffer 1.0G Nov 15 18:30 fully-allocated.raw

 

$ qemu-img measure -f raw -O qcow2 fully-allocated.raw 

required size: 1074135040

fully allocated size: 1074135040

 

$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 fully-allocated.raw fully-allocated.qcow2

 

$ ls -lhs fully-allocated.qcow2 

1.1G -rw-r--r--. 1 nsoffer nsoffer 1.1G Nov 15 18:31 fully-allocated.qcow2

 

 

We had code in vdsm that does exactly this, and it was removed since qemu-img

support a new "measure" command in RHEL 7.5 providing this info. But this works

only for existing images.

 

You can find the code in this vdsm commit:

 

The module implementing estimation:

 

The tests for this module:

 

If you know the data ranges that will be written to the qcow2 image, you can count

the clusters like this:

 

Then you can use the cluster count to estimate qcow2 file size:

 

Nir