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Guest VM's - FS

VM disk FS and underling disk image format compatibility

General informations:

  • two or more copy-on-write FSes/Formats are not suggested to be used on top of one another.
  • qcow2 format for disk images supports snapshots and is suggested on linux based hypervisors
  • virtio driver for Windows Guest VMs are greatly suggested to enhance Vm performance. Linux VMs have them natively.
  • There is no way, for now, to verify what FS the user will choose to format the disk OS-side. So as follows we report a compatibility table.

Compatibility table:

compatibility
✅ supported and suggested
⚠️ supported but not suggested
❌ available but not suggested at all
VM Disk FS
Image Format compatitbility Notes
NTFS qcow2 ✅
NTFS raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
ReFS qcow2 ❌ Two nested copy-on-write filesystems are not suggested, since they create great overhead and a significant decrease in the VM performance
ReFS raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
ExFAT qcow2 ✅
ExFAT raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
FAT32 qcow2 ✅
FAT32 raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
EXT4 qcow2 ✅
EXT4 raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
XFS qcow2 ✅
XFS raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
BTREFS qcow2 ❌ Two nested copy-on-write filesystems are not suggested, since they create great overhead and a significant decrease in the VM performance
BTRFS raw ⚠️ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support
ZFS qcow2 ❌ Two nested copy-on-write filesystems are not suggested, since they create great overhead and a significant decrease in the VM performance
ZFS raw ✅ raw format does not allow for native snapshot support, but ZFS can be delegated to perform backups

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