Bug 1256500

Summary: [RFE][scale] Snapshot deletion of poweredoff VM takes longer time.
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager Reporter: Amador Pahim <asegundo>
Component: ovirt-engineAssignee: Ala Hino <ahino>
Status: CLOSED ERRATA QA Contact: Raz Tamir <ratamir>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: high    
Version: 3.5.3CC: ahino, amureini, asegundo, bmcclain, hkim, jcoscia, lsurette, mkalinin, nsoffer, ratamir, rbalakri, Rhev-m-bugs, srevivo, tnisan, trichard, ykaul, ylavi
Target Milestone: ovirt-4.1.0-betaKeywords: FutureFeature
Target Release: ---Flags: bmcclain: priority_rfe_tracking+
gklein: testing_plan_complete-
Hardware: All   
OS: Linux   
URL: https://github.com/alhino/ovirt-site/blob/29cf794c5c6b246e32ba41227e476a719ee894a8/source/develop/release-management/features/storage/remove-snapshot.html.md
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Enhancement
Doc Text:
Previously, deleting a snapshot while the virtual machine was down took a long time. With this release, snapshot deletion while a virtual machine is down uses 'qemu-img commit' instead of 'qemu-img rebase', improving the performance of the operation.
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2017-04-25 00:48:59 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: Storage RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On: 1246114    
Bug Blocks: 1420198    

Description Amador Pahim 2015-08-24 18:30:03 UTC
Currently the merge operation is very expensive and requires the equivalent storage space available for the _MERGE image. See the flow on removing snapshot1:

  (raw 10G)
------------------------
| ca8b5daa (snapshot1) |
------------------------
     |            (cow)
     |        ------------
     ---------| 00d83dd2 |----
              ------------   |
                (active)     |
                             | qemu-img convert
    (raw 10G)                |
------------------ <----------
| 00d83dd2_MERGE | -----------
------------------           |
                             | 
                             | rename
 (raw 10G)                   | 
------------                 |
| 00d83dd2 |  <---------------
------------
  (active)

In consequence of the _MERGE image creation, storage can run out-of-space, since many users believe removing snapshots will free some storage space and they do that when the storage is close to the limit. The _MERGE volume is not desired at all in that scenario.

Qemu has support for 'qemu-img commit', wich can commit the changes in a cow image to its backing file. After the commit, we can drop the cow image and use the backing file directly.

Please change the offline merge method to use 'qemu-img commit' instead of the external merge image.

Comment 1 Nir Soffer 2015-08-24 18:55:55 UTC
Related to bug 1206328 (offline merge too slow).

Amador, please add relevant customer cases so we can schedule this.

Comment 3 Tal Nisan 2017-01-12 13:21:20 UTC
Ala, please update the doc text with the feature page or a relevant text