On Wednesday, 22 September 2021 09:55:26 CEST Tommy Sway wrote:
When I create the VM's image disk, I am not asked to select the
following
type of disk.
Actually you are, it's "Allocation Policy" drop down menu.
Thin provisioned == qcow format
Preallocated == raw
What is the default value ?
Thin provisioned, i.e. qcow.
Thanks.
QCOW2 Formatted Virtual Machine Storage
QCOW2 is a storage format for virtual disks. QCOW stands for QEMU
copy-on-write. The QCOW2 format decouples the physical storage layer from
the virtual layer by adding a mapping between logical and physical blocks.
Each logical block is mapped to its physical offset, which enables storage
over-commitment and virtual machine snapshots, where each QCOW volume only
represents changes made to an underlying virtual disk.
The initial mapping points all logical blocks to the offsets in the backing
file or volume. When a virtual machine writes data to a QCOW2 volume after a
snapshot, the relevant block is read from the backing volume, modified with
the new information and written into a new snapshot QCOW2 volume. Then the
map is updated to point to the new place.
Raw
The raw storage format has a performance advantage over QCOW2 in that no
formatting is applied to virtual disks stored in the raw format. Virtual
machine data operations on virtual disks stored in raw format require no
additional work from hosts. When a virtual machine writes data to a given
offset in its virtual disk, the I/O is written to the same offset on the
backing file or logical volume.
Raw format requires that the entire space of the defined image be
preallocated unless using externally managed thin provisioned LUNs from a
storage array.