There is lots of open source code for handling VHD files in userspace.  It's come from the work that we did on Xen, but none of it is Xen-specific.  Someone could repurpose that very usefully.  VHD files are perfect for this use-case.

Ewan.

-----Original Message-----
From: <email address hidden> [mailto:<email address hidden>] On Behalf Of Soren Hansen
Sent: Friday, July 15, 2011 6:49 AM
To: Ewan Mellor
Subject: Re: [Bug 810493] [NEW] No support for sparse images

2011/7/14 Vish Ishaya <email address hidden>:
> It is possible to put a qcow2 image into glance if you are using kvm.

It's debatable whether qcow2 images really are sparse :) but
nevertheless, I think Glance should support this more natively. There
is a *lot* of disk space and network traffic to be saved here.


If we take the Ubuntu 11.04 cloud image as an example:
$ ls -l ubuntu-11.04
-rw-r--r-- 2 glance nogroup 1476395008 2011-07-07 14:43 ubuntu-11.04

# Create a sparse version:
$ cp --sparse=always ubuntu-11.04 ubuntu-11.04.sparse

# a tar'ed version:
$ tar cvSf ubuntu-11.04.sparse.tar ubuntu-11.04.sparse

# Both gzip+tar:
$ tar cvzSf ubuntu-11.04.sparse.tar.gz ubuntu-11.04.sparse

$ ls -ls ubuntu-11.04*
1441824 -rw-r--r-- 2 soren  soren   1476395008 2011-07-07 14:43 ubuntu-11.04
 567012 -rw-r--r-- 1 soren  soren   1476395008 2011-07-15 15:14
ubuntu-11.04.sparse
 478856 -rw-r--r-- 1 soren  soren    490342400 2011-07-15 15:29
ubuntu-11.04.sparse.tar
 172208 -rw-r--r-- 1 soren  soren    176339294 2011-07-15 15:24
ubuntu-11.04.sparse.tar.gz

Unsurprisingly, the worst sinner is the fully allocated disk image.
It's costly to store and costly to transfer over the network.

The sparsely allocated image is quite a bit better in terms of storage
space on the Glance host, but doesn't save any network bandwidth.

The tar'ed version further reduces the allocated size by quite a bit
and also reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over
the network.

The tar+gzipped version, though, is the clear winner. It's only a
fraction of the size of the other images and also saves a *lot* of
bandwidth.

Just as an extra data point, I also added a gzip'ed version of the
original image:
 174448 -rw-r--r-- 1 soren  soren    178628893 2011-07-15 15:34 ubuntu-11.04.gz

..but before anyone suggests just adding support for Content-Encoding:
gzip, remember that this means that Glance would have to process the
full image (in this case, a reasonably measly 1.4 GB image, but
potentially much larger images) and compress it in-flight. The
receiving end would also need to do special tricks to maintain the
image's sparseness, as gunzip doesn't care to create sparse files on
unpack. Adding tar to the mix means that only 490342400 bytes need to
get gzip'ed, and tar natively handles packing/unpacking sparse images
effectively.

-- 
Soren Hansen        | http://linux2go.dk/
Ubuntu Developer    | http://www.ubuntu.com/
OpenStack Developer | http://www.openstack.org/

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/810493

Title:
  No support for sparse images

Status in OpenStack Image Registry and Delivery Service (Glance):
  New

Bug description:
  I could have sworn I filed this bug already, but I don't see it now.
  Oh, well.

  Glance does not seem to support any sort of sparse images. For
  example, Ubuntu's cloud images are a 1½ GB filesystem, but if it were
  sparsely allocated it would only take up a couple of hundred MB.

  Amazon handles this by using tarballs as their image transport format.

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