Opened 10 years ago
#13765 new enhancement
clonevm faster: make use of --reflink
| Reported by: | rugubara | Owned by: | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Component: | VM control | Version: | VirtualBox 4.3.20 |
| Keywords: | Cc: | ||
| Guest type: | all | Host type: | Linux |
Description
I'm running vbox machines off a btrfs partition with CoW. When combined with bcache (SSD-backed cache) the fragmentation penalty of fragmented images doesn't hurt much - i.e. I get adequate perfomance of 3-8 VMs on my Lenovo T540p notebook.
When I clone the vm (separate copy), virtualbox does a full copy of the image - taking considerable time (4 hours for 100GB image) and space. I suggest to utilize the "cp --reflink=auto" instead. The copy is made instantly (if possible and falls back to traditional copy) and no additional space is taken until there are changed blocks in the image file.

