kvm virtualization - free up not used space on a qcow2-image-file on kvm/qemu

we are using kvm/qemu with qcow2-images for our virtual machines.

qcow2 has this nice feature where the image file only allocates the actually needed space by the virtual-machine. but how do i shrink back the image file, if the virtual machine's allocated space gets smaller?

example:

1.) i create a new image with qcow2 format, size 100GB

2.) i use this image to install ubuntu. installation needs about 10 gb, the image-file grows up to about 10GB. nothing unexpected so far.

3.) i fill up the image with about 40 GB of additional data. the image-file grows up to 50GB. i am ok with that :-)

4.) this is where it gets strange: i delete all of the 40GB data on the image, but the image-size still eats up 50GB.

question: how do i free up that 40GB of data and shrink the image to the only needed 10 GB?

thanks in advance,
berni

Answer

The image will not shrink automatically, since when you delete files, you don't actually delete data (this is why undelete works). Qemu has a facility to shrink qcow2 images back, but what the utility does is really deduplicate the zeroes from the disk, leaving all other information intact. So the idea would be to:

1. Zero-fill the drive (dd if=/dev/zero of=/some/file until you run out of space)


2. delete /some/file


3. shut down the VM


4. cd to where the images for the VM are kept and run qemu-img convert -O qcow2 original_image.qcow2 deduplicated_image.qcow2


5. change the VM settings to use the new deduplicated_image.qcow2, test the VM is working, and remove the old image

This, afaik, will only work with qcow2 images, I haven't tested other formats.