Best way to import a large sparse RAW image from another qube without copying 500 GB?

[rustybird]

Importing a large (> dom0 disk size) standalone VM

It’s possible with a named pipe (FIFO). You have to do the volume import separately after VM creation, because qvm-create cannot automatically detect the correct volume size in this case so it has to be passed manually - which is only implemented for qvm-volume import. Continuing after the qemu-img convert step: [user@dom0 ~]$ mkfifo /tmp/fifo [user@dom0 ~]$ qvm-run --pass-io untrusted 'cat "/media/user/externalhd/win10.raw"' > /tmp/fifo While this^ is still running, open another terminal and…

This will still stream all 500 GB of data as if it was a non-sparse image, but that stream is sparsified as it is being written to disk as a VM volume (which using a named pipe allows you to do directly, instead of writing to dom0 temporary storage first).