I am using proxmox and created a virtual machine yesterday. Today, I noticed that there is hardly any memory left on my root nodes /dev/mapper disk, which causes the VM to stop. I found out that there is an image file (extension .qcow2) in the directory /var/lib/vz/images, which belongs to the newly created VM, which consumes quite a lot memory.
I know that images can be used to install operating systems from and I asked myself if this image file is a necessary component for the VM to work or if the image file is only created as a kind of backup. If it is a backup file, I could save it on another disk to solve my problem.
Thanks for your help.
It's your virtual machine disk, you cannot just remove it. You can create VM disk with "Thin provision" checked in Storage configuration on hypervisor, it will consume only what you use, not allocate all space at once. Use Clonezilla or dd to clone all data to new disk.