You can create a storage image once (the 'backing' image) and have QEMU keep mutations to this image in an overlay image.
QEMU can use tap networking for a virtual machine so that packets sent to the tap interface will be sent to the virtual machine and appear as coming from a network interface (usually an Ethernet interface) in the virtual machine.
On the other hand, the child image becomes invalid and it is the responsibility of the user to clean it up.
If you simply don't have the ability to download the large DVD or CD images, then you may wish to purchase a Gentoo DVD or CD.
The official downloader will not allow you to do a clean install until you first upgrade the older Windows.
Users do not care they simply have a bunch of small QCOW2 images (generally under 5GB, and 5 is already big I guess) that they want to run on the cloud.
Classical Greek myths record little about Leto other than her pregnancy and her search for a place where she could give birth to Apollo and Artemis, since Hera in her jealousy had caused all lands to shun her.
So if the user tries to boot an instance from this image this might be tricky if the conversion is not complete.
Internet, provided that the host is connected to it, but the virtual machines will not be directly visible on the external network, nor will virtual machines be able to talk to each other if you start up more than one concurrently.
Data can be shared between the host and guest OS using any network protocol that can transfer files, such as NFS, SMB, NBD, HTTP, FTP, or SSH, provided that you have set up the network appropriately and enabled the appropriate services.
This implies that once the user uploads the image it will appear as active but a conversion will be happening on the background.
The trick is to dynamically prepend a master boot record (MBR) to the real partition you wish to embed in a QEMU raw disk image.
One way to overcome that is to setup a tap device with a static IP, making linux automatically handle the routing for it, and then forward traffic between the tap interface and the device connected to the network through iptables rules.
If you use the default Glance filesystem backend, this will be easier to integrate into your image workflow.
Alternatively, the hard disk image can be in a format such as qcow2 which only allocates space to the image file when the guest operating system actually writes to those sectors on its virtual hard disk.
IP address and add an iptables rule to drop all traffic to the bridge in the INPUT chain, then the virtual machines will be able to talk to each other, but not to the physical host or to the outside network.
So if the image was a QCOW2 and we converted it in RAW, we don't really want to send back 50GB to the user.
Thus when a user uploads a new image, this image should transparently and automatically be converted.
After successful completion, the base image remains in read write mode and becomes the new active layer.
The backing image will then be left intact and mutations to this storage will be recorded in the overlay image file.