Re: [libvirt] Notes: Non-shared storage live migration w/ active blockcommit

On 09/25/2014 08:26 AM, Kashyap Chamarthy wrote: If you are using this snapshot only for the side-effect of growing the chain, you can add --no-metadata here instead of deleting the snapshot later when it gets invalidated [1]. Of course, if you pass --no-metadata, the snapshot name (snap1) and description (snap1-desc) are no longer important. This step is not quite right. You are asking for a shallow copy of the current file for disk 'vda' (that is, A'.qcow2). But that is NOT the same as the base A image. For this step, libvirt does not yet have an easy way to access the contents of a backing chain of a live domain; you CAN use 'virsh vol-*' commands to do a background copy from storage pools, but it may be easier to just resort to normal file system tools: cp /export/vmimages/A.qcow2 /export/vmimages/B.qcow2 or even rely on storage-array-specific commands to set up a trivial clone with no real time overhead (for example, some iscsi storage arrays allow efficient copy-on-write cloning of storage volumes by creating a new name that shares the same original contents of A.qcow2 as its starting point; and since we are about to delete A.qcow2 later on, we never need any actual data copying). [side note - we should really teach libvirt to not REQUIRE a size when creating an empty wrapper around an existing image] For this to work, you need to also use the --reuse-external flag to take advantage of the backing chain already recorded in B'.qcow2 (without the flag, the command will complain that B'.qcow2 already exists if it is a regular file; if it is a block device, it will just silently ignore the contents of the block device and treat B'.qcow2 as though an absolute path to A.qcow2 were its backing file). With steps 2 and 4 corrected, this indeed shortens the chain back down to just B.qcow2. And once this happens, you no longer need the path to A.qcow2 or A'.qcow2; you can also delete B'.qcow2. But back to the point I made earlier at [1]: if this is all you do, then 'virsh snapshot-list' will still show 'snap1' as a snapshot that tries to refer to A'.qcow2; since you just invalidated that with the copy, you'd need to 'virsh snapshot-delete --metadata vm1 snap1' to get rid of the stale snapshot (if you don't tweak step 1 to avoid creating that snapshot metadata in the first place). The NICE part about this whole sequence is that the backing file does NOT have to be qcow2, and it is VERY efficient timewise, if you happen to have an efficient way to do step 2. That is, I can go from a multi-gigabyte raw file A.img to raw file B.img in less than a second, assuming the guest isn't doing much I/O in the meantime, when scripting all these steps together, and without any guest downtime. -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org