Hi,
I've been quite successful maintaining several virtual machines, each machine has only one daemon/GUI/QT client. Eg I have BTC-qt, PPC-qt, LTC-qt, etc, etc, I even have a Solid Coin Virtual machine! 11 in total.
I feel this is the most secure way to run multiple clients, provide security, and segregate them to avoid any viruses, etc. Each VM runs Ubuntu linux 12.04 nowadays.
Anyhow, I have been using a dynamically sized disk with a virtual size of 20GB, has been working great. Until of course the BTC blockchain has now grown in size to require more. In the past, I had researched how to increase the virtual disk, and my general conclusion (this dates back a couple years) was that this cannot be done without some severe trouble. If anyone has tips on this, I am all ears!
But my main question is this. I went ahead and created a new VM with a 200 GB disk, again dynamically sized. I install the QT client, and have noticed that the VM disk grows to 60GB on my host machine (Windows 7) but the disk usage inside the client (Ubuntu 1204) is only using 12GB. Problem here is I have 60GB left on the host machine and the VM stops when the host machine's disk is full (duh).
How do you explain the VM disk growing to 60GB when the client is only using 12GB? My other BTC client that is filling up is 20GB in the client (Ubuntu) and is taking up 20GB in the host (Windows). Makes perfect sense.
Why is my new VM taking up 12 GB on the client and 60 GB on the host?
Thanks in advance!!!
if you download a blockchain of 8GB, your disk image will be 8GB bigger. if you delete the blockchain, the disk image will stay the same big and your guest will say its 8GB less. what virtualbox does is simple. guest wants to write to offset X but image isnt big enough so expand image a bit and map it to offset X. it isnt aware if you delete something inside your guest as it isnt working on a filesystem level.
