Mastering Proxmox - Third Edition

The .qcow2 images

The .qcow2 type is a very stable VM image format. Proxmox fully supports this file format. A VM disk created using .qcow2 is much smaller since by default it creates thin-provisioned disk images. For example, an Ubuntu VM created with 50 GB storage space may have an image file with a size around 1 GB. As a user stores data in the VM, this image file will grow gradually. The .qcow2 image format allows an administrator to over-provision VMs with the .qcow2 disk image file. If not monitored regularly, the shared storage will run out of space to accommodate all the growing virtual image files. Available storage space should be regularly monitored in such an environment. It is a good practice to add additional storage space when ...