On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Laurentiu Pancescu lpancescu@gmail.com wrote:
We should probably either:
- call GNU tar from Image Factory to preserve the sparseness of our image
files (and hope that Windows handles them properly)
- use VBoxManage to convert to .vhd (VirtualBox is not in our repos, but
Oracle offers a .rpm for EL7 systems).
I would prefer the second option, using VBoxManage to produce small non-sparse .VHD images for our Vagrant boxes, and avoid the compatibility problems posed by sparse files. But this would need to be done in Image Factory, so it's actually for Ian to decide if using VirtualBox is acceptable.
After using qemu-img to convert the qcow2 image to VHD and then extracting the resulting tar file on the Hyper V host, the resulting image was back to being 40GB 'non-sparse'.
Using VBoxManage instead, 'vagrant up' time was reduced to be comparable to the kozo/centos7 box:
centos7-hyperv (original image): 4m19.232s kozo/centos-7: 51.069s centos7-hyperv (converted with virtualbox): 48.041s
So I would also say the second option is the way to go if possible :)