Enabling QEMU Guest Agent anddddd FSTRIM (AGAIN)

In an earlier post I walked through reclaiming disk space from guests using FSTRIM and in a follow up I showed how to do the same thing with thin Logical Volumes as the sparse backing storage for the disk images. In both of the previous posts I logged in to the guest first and then executed the fstrim command in order to release the free blocks back to the underlying block devices.

Thankfully, due to some recent work, this operation has now been exposed externally via qemu Guest Agent and can be executed remotely via libvirt. To enable qemu Guest Agent, first I added a virtio-serial device that the host and guest will use for communication. I did this by adding the following to the guest’s xml:
\

<channel type='unix'>
  <source mode='bind' path='/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/Fedora19.agent'/>
  <target type='virtio' name='org.qemu.guest_agent.0'/>
</channel>

After a power cycle of the guest I added the qemu-guest-agent rpm inside of my guest. Then I started the qemu-guest-agent service using systemctl as shown below:
\

[root@guest ~]# yum install qemu-guest-agent
...
Installed:
  qemu-guest-agent.x86_64 2:1.4.2-2.fc19                                                                    

Complete!

[root@guest ~]# systemctl start qemu-guest-agent.service
[root@guest ~]# systemctl status qemu-guest-agent.service
qemu-guest-agent.service - QEMU Guest Agent
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/qemu-guest-agent.service; static)
   Active: active (running) since Sun 2013-06-02 16:38:18 EDT; 6s ago
 Main PID: 913 (qemu-ga)
   CGroup: name=systemd:/system/qemu-guest-agent.service
           └─913 /usr/bin/qemu-ga

Finally I could test out the fstrim functionality (again)! In the host I copied the file into the guest.
\

[root@host ~]# du -sh /guests/Fedora19.img 
1.3G    /guests/Fedora19.img
[root@host ~]# 
[root@host ~]# scp /tmp/code.tar.gz root@192.168.100.136:/root/
root@192.168.100.136's password: 
code.tar.gz                                                   100% 1134MB  81.0MB/s   00:14    
[root@host ~]# du -sh /guests/Fedora19.img 
2.4G    /guests/Fedora19.img

Then, inside the guest I deleted the file:
\

[root@guest ~]# rm /root/code.tar.gz 
rm: remove regular file ‘/root/code.tar.gz’? y

And finally I can remotely execute the guest-fstrim command via virsh:
\

[root@host ~]# 
[root@host ~]# virsh qemu-agent-command Fedora19 '{"execute":"guest-fstrim"}'
{"return":{}}

[root@host ~]# du -sh /guests/Fedora19.img 
1.3G    /guests/Fedora19.img

This is powerful stuff because I can now remotely (via libvirt) direct all of my guests, whether there be 5 or 5000, to all give back free space to underlying sparse storage devices.

The full guest libvirt XML from this post can be found here.

Hope everyone is having a great summer!

Dusty