No Consolidation: Disk images grow to insane sizes

[RonanAccuser]

Windows Backup has lots of issues.
The way I described seems to be the most reliable.

[ChristopherLarkin]

Currently the option available is the manual process I laid out.

The best way to get enhancements/fixes made to QNAP is via a Helpdesk ticket as QNAP does not generally monitor these forums. QNAP has been enhancing VS as seen by the changes between VS 2.x & 3.x. so hopefully that will be added as some point down the road.

Thanks for your help - I appreciate the reply!

[Trexx]

Currently the option available is the manual process I laid out.

The best way to get enhancements/fixes made to QNAP is via a Helpdesk ticket as QNAP does not generally monitor these forums. QNAP has been enhancing VS as seen by the changes between VS 2.x & 3.x. so hopefully that will be added as some point down the road.

Thanks for your help - I appreciate the reply!

No problem. Generally things will get fixed most of the time, but it does take some patience at times.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[ChristopherLarkin]

So true - they say patience is a virtue. One day there will be an app for that.

Thanks again for your contributions to the thread. I *love* the Virtualization Station and use it extensively, or at least enough to wish I had an i7 or two as the CPU(s) in this box!

Christopher

[alejandrom3m]

The max size for an .img file is whatever you set if for at time of VM creation. So if you tell Windows 10 that is can be 50GB, that is how big the .img file can grow to. It is 100% under your control how much space the files are going to take up.

There is a manual process you can use to shrink the file, which is outlined here:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Shrink_Qcow2_Disk_Files

Short Version (Replace .img file names where applicable):

Within Windows 10:

• Defrag HDD using Win10 or 3rd party defrag utility
• Zero out free space using SDelete

Shutdown the VM!


SSH'd onto QNAP:

1. Create symlink to qemu-img file to make it easier to work with files.

   Code: Select all

   ln -s /share/CACHEDEV1_DATA/.qpkg/QKVM/usr/bin/qemu-img /usr/sbin/qemu-img
   

2. Navigate to VM folder and create backup of existing image file.

   Code: Select all

   mv Win10.img Win10.img_backup
   

3. Create SHRUNK disk file.
   
   Faster Compress / Larger File:

   Code: Select all

   qemu-img convert -O qcow2 -Win10.img_backup Win10.img
   

   OR
   
   Slower Compress / Smaller File:

   Code: Select all

   qemu-img convert -O qcow2 -c Win10.img_backup Win10.img
   

4. Boot your VM and verify everything is working properly.
5. You can delete .img_backup files once you have validated the VM if you like.

I compressed my img and the size decrease from 50gb to 19gb.
What cons have the file shrunk compress? Time to load maybe?

Thanks for advance.

[Trexx]

So assuming that your set your VM Disk max to 50GB, the biggest drawback is as the VM writes additional data (i.e downloads patches, etc.) that expand past your 19GB size it will have to grow the storage on the fly (i.e. similar to how a Thin Volume works). This incurrs a performance penalty for your VM.

So unless you are really tight on space, from a performance perspective you are better off leaving the file as the larger size.

[signor_ali]

Hello, has there been any improvement on this subject? I also have .iso file constantly growing

[drdope]

The problem isn't as bad, as it was when this thread was started.
I'm running 8x Win10Pro vms and Ubuntu 18.04 vm on our companys TS-677 (R7-1700; 64GB; QM2-2P-384 with 2x 1TB Samsung EVO970/RAID1 as System/VM Drive and 3x 1TB Samsung 860EVO/RAID5 for local Backups).

The vms grow very moderately over time as would be expected (downloading/installing updates on them, occasionally adding a new app or just from the increasing amount of email synct to them via imap).
I recently set up an offsite-replication of our local backups via VPN and consolidated the image-space (using AcronisTI) for saving upload-time.
It free'd up about 80GB, about 9GB/vm. The VMs where initially set up in january 2019, so i wouldn't call the image growth "insane" anymore.

Back when we first used VS 2.x and Win7Pro vms, the images would rapidly expand to the specified maximum amount of disk space assigned.