Re: [Libvir] Re: Next features and target for development

Till Maas wrote: >On Mi Juli 11 2007, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > >>I'm interested to know how VirtualBox / VMWare deal with disk storage. >>Do they provide their own storage subsystems which support this or do >>they interact with things like LVM? > >The use their own subsystem. VMWare uses .vmdk files to store the harddisk >contents. When a snapshot is created, it creates a new one that depends on >the old one and stores every change in the new one. When the machine is >running during the snapshot, the complete state of the machine is stored, >too. I guess VirtualBox does it similiar. > >Qemu also provides this feature, except that afaik it is only possible to >savely create snapshots of powered off machines with the qcow2 image type. This is not correct. QEMU has supported (for a very long time) the ability to save/restore snapshots of running machines. In QEMU 0.9.0, instead of saving snapshots to an external file, snapshots are saved along with disk snapshots to the actual disk file. This of course requires that the disk format support this and currently qcow2 is the only format that does.