It would be nice to have virt-sparsify to reduce VM disks size when they have zeros/unused space.

 

https://libguestfs.org/virt-sparsify.1.html

For Windows VMs you can also do this https://forums.unraid.net/topic/51703-vm-faq/?tab=comments#comment-557606

 

15 hours ago, Squid said:

For Windows VMs you can also do this https://forums.unraid.net/topic/51703-vm-faq/?tab=comments#comment-557606

 

I have linux VMs. They are actually build nodes used to build packages for a linux distribution.  So my VMs accept jobs to compile and packages inside containers, upload said packages, then delete everything and start another job. I'm not sure if your suggestion works in this scenario does it?

Edited May 31, 20215 yr by Darksurf

On 5/30/2021 at 9:08 PM, Darksurf said:

I have linux VMs. They are actually build nodes used to build packages for a linux distribution.  So my VMs accept jobs to compile and packages inside containers, upload said packages, then delete everything and start another job. I'm not sure if your suggestion works in this scenario does it?

 

I'd determined I needed the same (libguestfs as a whole, specifically), and am planning to scope out the amount of work it's going to take me to do so this weekend - if it compiles without issue, I'll try to remember to check what the process is to submit it to community apps as a plugin and you can use it that way 👍

 

EDIT / P.S. 

@Darksurf - FYI, looks like someone's made a docker for this use case already:
https://github.com/brandonkal/guestfs

 

I'm wanting this to be done on the hypervisor side though, as it pretty well provides the keys to the kingdom, and I'd just rather have that kind of power restricted to the root user.

Edited October 1, 20214 yr by BVD

@Darksurf just a quick update here from some time I spent on this last night - in short, it's a bit of a PITA, and requires both adding new packages, as well as updating existing ones (not just those from the nerd and dev packs, but core libraries within unraid as well). This is honestly pretty dangerous, as any updates to unraid then have a much higher risk of breaking things due to dependency hell.

 

Just to give an idea of where it's at so far:

- mkisofs missing - install cdr tools from nerd pack

- bison and/or yacc required - pulled bison from Slackware 14.2 repo

- augeas/libtirpc missing - libtirpc breaks nerd pack and dev pack updates (which I should've foreseen honestly 😓), augeas dependencies missing, but those can be loaded from dev pack. Eventually decided to set env variables in make so it didn't try to get packages on it's own as we don't really want that anyway...

- gperf missing - self compiled and added

- libmagick missing - this is part of the file tool, unraid includes 5.36...

 

This is where I stopped. I'm going to have to re-evaluate whether I need this badly enough on the core OS to accept/take the risks associated with all of these modifications... Seems there's likely a pretty valid reason it's not been in Slackware before perhaps? For now I think I'm going to put this on pause and re-evaluate what other options are available.

any updates?  need guestfish to increase vm size

never mind I ended up doing this

unraid#  virsh blockresize FedoraVNC /mnt/user/domains/Fedora/vdisk1.img 60G
guest# parted
        Fix
        resizepart 3 100%
        w
        q
guest# pvresize /dev/vda3  
guest# lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root
guest# resize2fs /dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-root

 

Edited April 9, 20224 yr by uek2wooF

On 5/30/2021 at 4:20 AM, Darksurf said:

It would be nice to have virt-sparsify to reduce VM disks size when they have zeros/unused space.

 

https://libguestfs.org/virt-sparsify.1.html

Hey, did you ever get anywhere with installing virt-sparsify ?

On 5/23/2022 at 3:18 AM, ThatDude said:

Hey, did you ever get anywhere with installing virt-sparsify ?

 

Unfortunately, no. The Dependency Hell threw a wrench in it. I've not tried since. Dealing with such deps on a static system is risky. This kind of power is really needed on the hypervisor side. You would also have to script/add/install all the deps and tool itself on every install due to the static nature of unraid (which is fair).  That being said, if all the deps and the tool were installed from the beginning, this would be far less of a problem.

Hi everyone!

we could though install virt tools into a small linux vm or live cd/img and do these operations right? I guess providing direct access to the domains share.

Edited September 6, 20232 yr by NickI