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When using most hypervisors your virtual drives grow indefinitely until they
reach their max size as the virtual machine is used. You can check the max size
of your virtual drive ls
and check the actual used disk space with du
.
/var/lib/libvirt/images ls -lh camera.qcow2
-rw------- 1 libvirt libvirt 401G May 27 16:29 camera.qcow2
/var/lib/libvirt/images du -h camera.qcow2
345G camera.qcow2
This particular virtual machine takes up 345Gb, but if I boot up the virtual
machine and check the file manager I’m using far less than that. When files are
deleted in a virtual machine data is not freed up on the host. Fortunately,
there’s a wonderful tool called virt-sparsify
that can be used to shrink the
drive. It comes as part of libguestfs
which is a c library and collection of
simple tools for creating, reading, and modifying virual disk images. It works
with the vast majority of hypervisors including VMware, KVM, qemu, VirtualBox,
and Xen to name a few. It includes loads of helpful tools, but I probably use it
for virt-sparsify
most often.
sudo virt-sparsify camera.qcow2 camera-mini.qcow2