Quoting "Toby Corkindale" <toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au>:
On 06/02/12 14:54, Peter Ross wrote:
Quoting "Toby Corkindale"<toby.corkindale@strategicdata.com.au>:
Ah, it might solve 90% of your problem, but it doesn't for most people, where a VM image is created from scratch via an ISO image of an installer, and then the VM has lots of patches and upgrades applied over time.
You can make a fresh install and a snapshot, that is subsequently used for cloning (so you avoid to install again and again).
Because you create a clone from the same snapshot again and again, you do not duplicate the space.
I rarely create a new image from scratch.
Yeah, but we're talking about virtual MACHINES here. They run. They change. Even if the base install is near enough to identical, after a year or so and the VMs have been release-upgraded, you've diverged from that original snapshot entirely -- yet all the images still share a lot of identical code if they're the same ubuntu/debian/whatever version.
Although for those kind of VMs, I tend to use Linux Containers instead anyway
I do it in similar fashion with jails here, and a copy-on-write system as ZFS or btrfs fits very neatly in this.
it's more often Windows machines in VM images, which don't enjoy having their images repeatedly cloned at all. (Well, not if you don't want the licensing system bitching at you all the time)
To a certain point SYSPREP may help. Fortunately I don't have much need for it these days:-) I could use deduplication on ZFS but the available storage is too big to consider it;-) But I see your point and agree that it can be handy. Regards Peter