[CentOS-virt] LVM-snapshot based KVM VMs

Wed Apr 25 21:21:31 UTC 2012
Paul Basov <paul.basov at gmail.com>

Good m/d/n guys, wanted to put idea through you before trying to implement
this.

So afaik LVM snapshots basically don't take any "real" space on hard drives.

I'm using KVM virtualization on my hosts and let's say i create an LVM
volume for my linux VM, then install it properly, shut it down and take LVM
snapshot of it.

Basically i've just cloned it (LVM2 snapshots are r/w).

I feed it to KVM and that's it? Can i snapshot this volume N number times
and get N number of VMs that take zero actual space on actual hard drive?

And when cloned VMs start writing, they will be actually writing only diffs
from "master" VM. This looks like an interesting idea to manage a lot of
"template" VMs while saving huge amounts of disk space.

Or maybe i'm just inventing the bicycle. What do you think? Is this
possible?
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