Concepts of QCOW2 & RAW format
QCOW2 Formatted Virtual Machine Storage QCOW2 is a storage format for virtual machine disk images. QCOW stands for QEMU copy on write. T he QCOW2 format decouples the physical storage layer from the virtual layer by adding a mapping between logical and physical blocks. Each logical block is mapped to its physical offset, which enables storage over-comittment and virtual machine snapshots, where each QCOW volume only represents changes made to an underlying disk image. T he initial mapping points all logical blocks to the offsets in the backing file or volume. When a virtual machine writes data to a QCOW2 volume after a snapshot, the relevant block is read from the backing volume, modified with the new information and written into a new snapshot QCOW2 volume. T hen the map is updated to point to the new place. RAW T he RAW storage format has a performance advantage over QCOW2 in that no formatting is applied to virtual machine disk images stored in the RAW format. Virtual machi...