Getting ready

To use this recipe, we need to have the qemu-img utility installed. If you followed the steps in the first recipe, you should have that covered. To check what image types are supported on your Linux distribution, run the following command:

root@kvm:~# qemu-img -h | grep Supported
Supported formats: bochs vvfat rbd vpc parallels tftp ftp ftps raw https qcow dmg http qcow2 quorum null-aio cloop vdi iscsi null-co vhdx blkverify file vmdk host_cdrom blkdebug host_device sheepdog qed nbd
root@kvm:~#

From the preceding output, we can see that there are many supported images on the test system that we are using. Make sure that your QEMU version supports the raw image type, as it's the default and that is what we are going to use in this recipe. One of the most commonly used image type is qcow2, which supports copy on write, compression, encryption, and snapshotting. We are going to leverage that in later recipes.