vmx file to specify the existing VMDK image file as follows. clonehdĬonverting virtual HDDs between VDI, VMDK and VHD The clonehd command of VBoxManage supports the conversion between VDI, VMDK, VHD, so the three major virtualization's hypervisors are supported (Oracle, VMware and Microsoft). While creating a VM, just choose ' Use an existing virtual hard drive file' option, and use the existing VDI image file. Once you create a VDI-formatted disk image from a VMDK counterpart, you can create a new VM on VirtualBox, and attach the VDI image to the VM.

To convert VMDK to VDI with qemu-img: $ qemu-img convert input.vmdk -O vdi output.vdi The output of this command will be similar to the following: >$ /usr/bin/VBoxManage clonehd image_to_convert.vmdk converted.vdi -format VDI -variant standard -type normal To convert VMDK to VDI with VboxManage: >$ VBoxManage clonehd -format VDI input.vmdk output.vdi Before conversion, make sure to power off the VM whose disk image is being converted. To use qemu-img on CentOS, Fedora or RHEL: $ sudo yum install qemuĪssuming that you have either of these two command-line tools available on your system, I will show how to convert between VirtualBox VDI and VMware VMDK formats, and how to import a converted standalone disk image in a VM. To use qemu-img on Ubuntu or Debian: $ sudo apt-get install qemu-utils The second Linux tool is qemu-img command which is part of qemu hardware virtualization package. If you already installed VirtualBox on your system, VBoxManage is ready for use right away without installing any other software. The first tool is VBoxManage ( vboxmanage.exe on Windows), which is a command-line utility that comes with VirtualBox. If you want to convert VirtulBox VDI image to VMware VMDK image, or vice versa, there are two command-line utilities available to use.

There are several disk image formats used by virtualization software VDI for Oracle VM VirtualBox, and VMDK for VMware vSphere, to name a few. To totally unlock this section you need to Log-in

Vdi vs vhd vs vmdk