How to decrease size of KVM virtual machine disk image

Posted by Cerin on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Cerin
Published on 2012-10-13T20:41:42Z Indexed on 2012/10/13 21:39 UTC
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linux

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virtual-machines

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kvm-virtualization

How do you decrease or shrink the size of a KVM virtual machine disk?

I allocated a virtual disk of 500GB (stored at /var/lib/libvirt/images/vm1.img), and I'm finding that overkill, so now I'd like to free up some of that space for use with other virtual machines. There seems to be a lot answers on how to increase image storage, but not decrease it. I found the virt-resize tool, but it only seems to work with raw disk partitions, not disk images.

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