Curse virtualbox. The removal of the ability to compact images cripled me for almost a week.
Oh yeah, I started using it because responses from the VM in heavy GUI apps was faster in VirtualBox than QEMU. I made a trade off, QEMU upon which code virtualbox is based upon is much better, but a lot slower; I wanted the faster one for GUI apps.
I haven’t been able to get mplayer to properly in Fedora Core 12, it hangs when trying to create an xml structure for a DVD. I restored my old FC11 system backup into a VirtualBox VM where the mplayer command works just fine.
But, as I wanted the VM just for DVD authouring I deleted all the stuff I didn’t need for that function from the VM and wanted to compress it. Well there isn’t any easy way.
Lots of google searches showed threads on the subject, the compress feature was removed from virtualbox. There was a windows utility for those running VirtualBox on windows that would compress a VDI image supposedly; I’m sure it works on VirtualBox images for windows OS’s, it certainly didn’t compress anything in an LVM filesystem.
Why did the VirtualBox team decide to continue to support dynamic disk images that could grow if they were not going to support the compression of them, makes no sense !.
The clonehd option I never tried, I didn’t have the free space for that with the uncompressed image still on disk.
In the end it was CloneZilla I used to compress it.
Backup from the VM using CloneZilla to an ntfs drive, backup the disk image, delete the VM disk file, create a new empty VM disk file, and use CloneZilla to restore the backed up disk. Well that worked, a 45Gb image became a 15Gb image. Space to work with again finally.
But the backup via CloneZilla took a full week… when will they fix that damn ‘nfs stale file handle’ error on nfs mounts in fedora, it has plagued me since FC10 and nfs filesystem mounts are no better in FC12. Using nfs filesystems under Fedora is just not stable. But eventually the nfs mount stayed up long enough to do the backup.
My smaller 15Gb stable image I have offloaded to a backup external disk. The idea being I will boot into it in VirtualBox when I need to do DVD authouring, and when done just replace the image used to do the work with that backup… or in other words at this point in time VirtualBox machines are only usefull if you write no data you want to save into them, without a compress ability the only option I can see is blow away all changes made to the VM and start from scratch from the static backup.
I might switch back to QCOW images using QEMU instead of VirtualBox. Even though VirtualBox was based on the QEMU code the old QCOW disk images were a lot more manageable than the VirtualBox VDI ones, they should have kept them as the default in VirtualBox.
Fortunately the Fedora image is now the only one I use in VirtualBox. The only other VM I use on a regular basis is a Solaris 10 one, and that works better (in runlevel 3) under QEMU that the SUN VirtuaBox tool.
