KVM – detach disk

sudo virsh detach-disk --domain test --persistent --live --target vdb

KVM – Add / Attach Disk

Create disk:
qemu-img create \
-f qcow2 \
-o lazy_refcounts=on,preallocation=falloc \
$FILEPATH \
[size]G

qemu-img comes with various options for setting the allocation when creating new disk images.

preallocation=metadata – allocates the space required by the metadata but doesn’t allocate any space for the data. This is the quickest to provision but the slowest for guest writes.

preallocation=falloc – allocates space for the metadata and data but marks the blocks as unallocated. This will provision slower than metadata but quicker than full. Guest write performance will be much quicker than metadata and similar to full.

preallocation=full – allocates space for the metadata and data and will therefore consume all the physical space that you allocate (not sparse). All empty allocated space will be set as a zero. This is the slowest to provision and will give similar guest write performance to falloc.

Convert disk:
mv disk.qcow2 disk.qcow2.bak
qemu-img convert -O qcow2 -o lazy_refcounts=on,preallocation=falloc disk.qcow2.bak disk.qcow2


Attach disk:
virsh attach-disk [vm ID] \
--source /path/to/disk.qcow2 \
--target vd[x] \
--persistent \
--subdriver qcow2