The Linux Sysadmins Guide to Virtual Disks
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The Linux Sysadmins Guide to Virtual Disks

From the basics to the advanced

Tim Bielawa

Edited by

Jon Connell

Edited by

Henry Graham

Edited by

Jyoti Sabharwal

Copyright © 2009-2016 Tim Bielawa

The Linux Sysadmins Guide to Virtual Disks by Tim Bielawa is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en_US.

Acknowledgments

This is where all the acknowledgments will go.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Typographical Conventions
1.3. Units & Prefixes
1.4. Getting Help/Feedback
2. The Virtual Disk Cookbook
2.1. Creating Simple Images
2.2. Resizing Disk Images
2.2.1. Resizing RAW Images
2.2.2. Resizing QCOW2 Images
2.3. Query an Image for Information
2.4. Converting Between RAW and QCOW2
2.4.1. Convert an Image from RAW to QCOW2
2.4.2. Convert an Image from QCOW2 to RAW
2.5. Creating Disks with Backing Images
2.6. Comitting changes to a backing image
2.7. Cloning a Physical Disk
3. Disk Concepts
3.1. Creating a 1GiB virtual disk from scratch
3.1.1. Background on the dd command
3.1.2. Running dd
3.1.3. Examining the Created File
3.1.4. Create a Partition Table
3.2. Devices and Partitions
3.2.1. Introduction
3.2.2. Creating a Loop Device
3.2.3. Examine the loop device
3.2.4. Creating partitions
3.2.5. Formatting Partitions
3.2.6. Cleaning Up
4. Helper Utilities
4.1. libguestfs
4.1.1. guestmount
4.1.2. virt-filesystems
4.1.3. virt-rescue
4.1.4. virt-resize
4.1.5. virt-sparsify
4.2. virt manager
5. Disk Formats
5.1. RAW
5.2. QCOW
5.3. QCOW2
5.4. Other Formats
6. Performance Considerations
6.1. I/O Caching
6.1.1. Write-back Caching
6.1.2. Write-through Caching
6.1.3. Caching: Summary
6.2. Virtual Device
6.3. I/O Schedulers
6.3.1. Scheduler Options
6.3.2. CFQ
6.3.3. Deadline
6.3.4. NOOP
6.3.5. Backing Storage
6.3.6. Additional Resources
6.4. cgroups options
7. Troubleshooting/FAQs
A. Appendix: Man Pages
UNITS — decimal and binary prefixes
B. Appendix: Disk Drive History
B.1. Disk Drive Components
B.2. Access Modes
B.2.1. CHS Addressing
B.2.2. LBA Addressing
B.3. The Master Boot Record
Glossary
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   Chapter 1. Introduction