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user62545
Asked: 2011-04-09 04:26:53 +0800 CST

OVF disk formats

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I thought that VMs exported as OVF were supposed to be completely portable, but now I see there are difference disk formats

I used the VMware ovf tool to export a VMX to OVF. The disk file created with the OVF is a VMDK.

I want to import the VM into RHEV, but the Red Hat documentation says that the accepted disk formats are RAW and COW. In contrast the VMware OVF tool says it can export to: monolithicSparse, monolithicFlat, twoGbMaxExtentSparse, twoGbMaxExtentFlat, streamOptimized, thin (vSphere target), thick (vSphere target).

How can I convert my VMDK OVF to a RAW OVF and then import it to RHEV? The documented virt-v2v tool seems to only work with VMware ESX, not vmx/vmdk/ovf images on disk.

rhel5 vmware-vmdk ovf

2 Answers

  1. Try qemu-img, it supports various formats for input and input.

    In a last try, you can finally mount the disk on a VM and tar or dd it to another place, more friendly to other tools.

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  2. OVF is basically an XML file that describes a VM, it doesn't contain it. There is a supported solution for moving VMs from VMWare, called virt-v2v.

    The raw and cow formats are open formats supported by qemu, while all the vmware options are based on vmware's vmdk format.

    This guide has a good description of the way virt-v2v should be used: http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization_for_Servers/2.2/html/Administration_Guide/virt-v2v-scripts.html

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