Greetings,
I have the following typical scenario: given one or more qcow2 base images I clone them with COW and start the VMs.
At a certain point I'd like to inspect them in order to see their evolution compared to the known base images. To do so I was thinking about taking a disk snapshot of each VM and inspect its content through libguestfs (using it's Python bindings).
Obviously I need the base image in order for libguestfs to correctly guess the OS, the FS structure etc.. Problem is that that point when I inspect the disk I get the whole disk state including the base image content (30K+ files and directories).
This is not an issue but it's a very heavy operation considering that some of the snapshots are few megabytes while the base images are several gigabytes.
Is there a way to programmatically instruct libguestfs to limit the inspection to the sole snapshot?
Would it work as well with other disk format (vmdk linked clones for example)?
For better comprehension I'll show the sequence I'm doing (I might do it wrong of course):
virsh -c "qemu:///system" snapshot-create --disk-only <domain-ID>
I get the snapshot location from its XML description and then:
qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O qcow2 base_image.qcow2 snapshot.qcow2
At that point I mount it through libguestfs and inspect its content.