Qcow2 vs raw gaming. Be aware of multiple cows e.

Qcow2 vs raw gaming . Raw vs Qcow2: Qemu/KVM provides support for various image formats. Both good options. The two major disk image formats, widely recommended and used are raw and qcow2. Like Raw image, Qcow2 is also a popular image format in virtual environment and at present, it has nearly the same excellent performance as Raw image. , see the answer to this post: Which is better image format, raw or qcow2, to use as a baseimage for other VMs? I wrote this blog on VM disk performance tuning where I collected some info, perhaps it helps. Compared with the common Raw image, it has other features: 1. The bottom line? qcow2 is good enough to use and I like it cuz the flexibility it offers. Thus, lets understand what they are and their differences. Qcow2 is short for QEMU Copy on Write 2, a kind of virtual image format supported by QEMU emulator. Qcow2 for features. Raw for performance. g. In the realm of virtual machines, data performance and security is everything. In this section, we familiarize ourselves with two types of data storage formats on virtual servers: Raw and Qcow2, and we will examine the advantages of each. Proxmox Docs suggests using Raw format for Windows VMs, because of the big performance gain. The choice between base image + qcow2 overlay vs multiple full copies depends on your priority: For absolute performance, use fallocated RAW images. From what I read, raw should be faster (more performance) then qcow2. The bottom line? qcow2 is good enough to use and I like it cuz the flexibility it offers. I'd like to know if is there an advantage too using Raw format for Linux VMs, and when should we use qcow2 ? the disk format will follow your choice of backing storage. Both formats have their advantages and drawbacks, impacting factors such as backup strategies, storage utilization, and performance. For some more considerations as to the file system/LVM etc. This has the downside of not supporting snapshot, with in most environments is a too high price to pay; For flexibility and space-efficiency use RAW base images + Qcow2 overlays. Be aware of multiple cows e. Raw vs. I disabled Btrfs' CoW for my VM image directory using chattr +C /srv/vmimg/ . Choosing between raw and qcow2 image formats is crucial for optimizing performance and efficiency in KVM/OpenStack environments. In older benchmarks this is truly visible, but in newer qcow2 versions this seems to have only an impact of up to 5% or even less. With regards to images for Linux VMs I used raw images, as for Windows (which I used for gaming) I used Qcow2 for live backups. btrfs at host, qcow2 for vm disk and btrfs in guest will lead to degradation. Qcow2.