To sum up part of the work in GSoC 2011, this post talks about some facts of real-world VMDK format, which is not quite well documented in the official Specification Virtual Disk Format 1.1 (version may be changed from the time this was written).
Read on →Bug report:
Read on →VMDK3 is a format which QEMU has implemented r/w support, it is the only image format that VMware Workstation 3 produces, and was updated to what we call VMDK4 since Workstation 4.0. The older format is no longer valid in latest VMware Workstation versions, so I have to install Workstation 3 to get an image sample.
Read on →Bug report:
Link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/784977
Reported by Andy Brook on 2011-05-19
Read on →Stream optimized VMDK image allocates minimized space for a compressed cluster, which means if there is high compress ratio, a cluster possibly only takes one physical sector in the file. Which makes overwriting hard, especially when new data needs more sectors than previously allocated.
Read on →VMware VDDK contains a tool ‘vmware-mount’ that is capable of mounting a partition in VMDK disk. For example if we have a disk image named Minit.vmdk in which a Linux Mint is installed. We can examine the partitions with vmware-mount command by:
sudo vmware-mount -p Mint.vmdk
The output is:
Read on →The VMware behavior on opening VMDK disk is:
Read the descriptor file, if it has magic bytes (“VMDK” or “COWD”) in first 4 bytes, it’s recognized as monolithic sparse disk, otherwise try to parse the file as a text file.
Read on →Work done this week:
Read on →Create VM disk:
qemu-img create ESX.qcow2 -f qcow2 16G
Start VM to install from CD (enable KVM to speed up, and give a e1000 nic to make sure ESX can support it, otherwise the installation will abort):
qemu -enable-kvm ESX.qcow2 -cdrom "ESX Server 3.5.iso" -boot d -net nic,model=e1000
Select proper options in the wizard, wait for a while until the server’s installed.