Thursday, 12 May 2016

Convert .vmdk to .qcow2/qemu



VMware and VirtualBox use .vmdk file as their virtualization. VMDK (Virtual Machine Disk) is a file format that acts as containers for virtual hard disk drives to be used in virtual machines monitor. While .vmdk file can be used on any virtual machine monitor, some virtual machine monitor cannot run .vmdk file and only accept the other type of virtualization file which is called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM is a virtualization for the Linux kernel that turns it into a hypervisor. Some of the virtual machine monitor that runs KVM are Proxmox, Kimchi, OpenQRM

The trouble began when we has a running VM with .vmdk format, but we want to use on the machine that accepts the KVM. To do this, we need to convert the .vmdk file into another type. Usually KVM runs with .qcow2 or .qemu format. After some researchs, I found out that you need a copy of the .vmdk file first. To do this, VMware workstation already has a tool called vmware-vdiskmanager that is accessible on the VMware workstation folder.





Confirms it by see it on the folder.



Now, download a qemu file converter that is called qemu-img. Can be downloaded from here for Windows. Extract it and put the .exe file on the same folder with the target .vmdk files. Now, I convert the .vmdk file into .qcow2


Once the file has been successfuly converted, check it using the check and info command.



 
The converted file will be available on the VMware workstation folder



That’s it, this is one of the way to convert a .vmdk file.

References:




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