OpenStack — nova image-create, under the hood

NOTE (05-OCT-2016): This post is outdated — the current code (in snapshot() and _live_snapshot() methods in libvirt/driver.py) for cold (where the guest is paused) snapshot & live snapshot has changed quite a bit. In short, they now use libvirt APIs managedSave(), for cold snapshot; and blockRebase(), for live snapshot.

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I was trying to understand what kind of image nova image-create creates. It’s not entirely obvious from its help output, which says — Creates a new image by taking a snapshot of a running server. But what kind of snapshot? let’s figure.

nova image-create operations

The command is invoked as below

 $  nova image-create fed18 "snap1-of-fed18" --poll 

Drilling into nova’s source code — nova/virt/libvirt/driver.py — this is what image-create does:

1. If the guest — based on which snapshot is to be taken — is running, nova calls libvirt’s virsh managedsave, which saves and stops a running guest, to be restarted later from the saved state.
2. Next, it creates a qcow2 internal disk snapshot of the guest (now offline).
3. Then, extracts the internal named snapshot from the qcow2 file & exports it to a RAW format and temporarily places in $instances_path/snapshots.
4. Deletes the internal named snapshot from the qcow2 file.
5. Finally, uploads that image into OpenStack glance service — which can be confirmed by running glance image-list.

Update: Steps 2 and 4 above are now effectively removed with this upstream change.

A simple test
To get a bit more clarity, let’s try Nova’s actions on a single qocw2 disk — with a running Fedora 18 OS — using libvirt’s shell virsh and QEMU’s qemu-img:

 
# Save the state and stop a running guest
$ virsh managedsave fed18 

# Create a qemu internal snapshot
$ qemu-img snapshot -c snap1 fed18.qcow2 

# Get information about the disk
$ qemu-img info fed18.qcow2 

# Extract the internal snapshot, 
# convert it to raw and export it a file
$ qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O raw -s \
    snap1 fed18.qcow2 snap1-fed18.img 

# Get information about the new image
# extracted from the snapshot
$ qemu-img info snap1-fed18.img 

# List out file sizes of the original 
# and the snapshot
$ ls -lash fed18.qcow2 snap1-fed18.qcow2 

# Delete the internal snapshot 
# from the original disk
$ qemu-img snapshot -d snap1 fed18.qcow2 

# Again, get information of the original disk
$ qemu-img info fed18.qcow2 

# Start the guest again
$ virsh start fed18 

Thanks to Nikola Dipanov for helping me on where to look.

Update: A few things I missed to mention (thanks again for comments from Nikola) — I was using libvirt, kvm as underlying hypervisor technologies, with OpenStack Folsom release.