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[Salman A Baset <sabaset@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello folks,

I was wondering if there is any plan to incorporate cleanup of unused
images that reside on /var/lib/nova/instances/_base directory of a compute
node in Essex release and beyond.

What are the best practices of sizing storage requirement
for /var/lib/nova/instances/_base . For instance, if a user can create
image snapshots and then boot instances from that images, those snapshots
can quickly fill the disk space. How are folks managing sizing of _base in
practice?

What about mounting _base directory over say NFS? Mounting _base over NFS
can decrease the provisioning time for a new image since the whole image
does not have to be copied first. This is especially useful for images that
are snapshots. However, it can impact runtime performance.

I have seen examples such as those in the link below, which use qemu to
find which images are in use.
http://www.stillhq.com/openstack/000001.html

Thanks.

Best Regards,

Salman A. Baset
Research Staff Member, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Tel: +1-914-784-6248