Howto resize a libvirt (kvm/qemu) disk image

I’m using kvm for a while at work. Everything works quite fine, but today I needed to grow a disk image. I found some informations, but none are really clear so here the result :

First create a empty image file .. with this command (don’t use dd, qemu-img is really quicker than dd):

qemu-img create -f raw temp.img 10G

Next simply your image file + the temp one, in a biggest one ..

cat foo.img temp.img > bar.img

You will get a new image file which is 10G bigger than the original one .. Now you can boot your OS, and discover (via cfdisk for example), that your system has a additionnal 10G unused space .. So next step:

Just create a new partition, and mount it in the normal way
Boot your kvm OS from a ISO file containing Gparted

I tried the second approach, and used a ubuntu install to boot (using virt-manager, this is really easy to do). And resized the partition to my need .. simply reboot and “tada” :)

Enjoy disk ?

11 thoughts on “Howto resize a libvirt (kvm/qemu) disk image”

Can you do it faster by replacing the second step with

cat temp.img >> foo.img

Can you do it even faster by enlarging the first file in-place with

dd if=/dev/null of=foo.img bs=1b seek=20G count=0

(in this case the 20G is the new total size, not the increment!)?

For Marius:

cat temp.img >> foo.img

Yes, you can do this, but this would delete the backup too ..

For the second way, I don’t think this will work because enlarge it with /dev/zero (not null, i think).. and this not a valid partition..

Bye

Great post.Thanks alot..That article helps me out.Before i had some problems with it.
Greetings from Germany

Much faster way, using dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.img bs=1 count=1 seek=$(($(stat -c%s foo.img)+10*1024**3-1))

Obviously your method (and this) only work when dealing with raw images.

There are much much simpler ways exist. Modern coreutils has an utility named truncate – it can “truncate” afile to _larger_ size. So, provided you had image.raw of size N GB, and you want it to be N+M Gb, you use truncate –size $((N+M))G image.raw. _Much_ safer and simpler… ;)