[CentOS-devel] The status of our Vagrant images for Hyper-V
Laurentiu Pancescu
lpancescu at gmail.com
Fri Apr 7 11:51:03 UTC 2017
Some more information after experimenting with sparse images (both me
and Michael).
After creating a .vhd image in a Vagrant guest, transferring it to a
Windows machine while preserving its sparse nature proved to be not so
straightforward. Samba, scp and rsync produce a regular 40GB file at
the destination, not a sparse one. Probably the only chance is to use
GNU tar or bsdtar on the guest to create a tar archive containing the
sparse file, and use GNU tar to expand that on Windows, after
transferring the archive (which is a regular file). That's just for a
quick test: an official Vagrant image would need to be extracted by
Vagrant on Windows, we still to figure out what it will do. Does anyone
have any experience with backup software typically used on Windows,
especially if they can backup and restore sparse files?
On OS X, the HFS+ filesystem has no support for sparse files, and Apple
removed sparse file support from their implementation of UFS (which used
to have them).
On 06/04/17 14:03, Laurentiu Pancescu 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.
More information about the CentOS-devel
mailing list