This post talks about two software to convert VMDK to QCOW2 in Windows for free. The software I have added here takes a healthy VMDK file from you and produces the corresponding QCOW2 file. The generated QCOW2 files can be used in the dedicated software such as Qemu as a virtual hard drive for the machine. Also, there are other Linux tools that can mount QCOW2 files, you can use it in those as well. However, currently there is no way in Windows to mount them as virtual drives. But you can create QCOW2 files in Windows using a couple of free software that you will see in the post below.
Convert VMDK To QCOW2 In Windows With These Free Software
StarWind V2V Image Converter is another free software that allows you to painlessly convert a VMDK file to QCOW2 and then you can use that in the virtual machine software that use QCOW format for the virtual disk. This is quite a powerful software that you can use in Windows to convert different type of virtual machine hard disk files to variety of formats including QCOW2. In just a few clicks, you can easily convert a VMDK file to QCOW2 and it even supports the reverse conversion as well. Recently, I uses the same software for VMDK to VHD conversion and now you can use it for VMDK to QCOW2 disk as well.
QCOW2 is not really a very popular format in the context of virtual machines. And this is why these are the only free software I could find to convert a VMDK file to QCOW2 in Windows. If you are on Linux, there are more advantages for you as you can mount QCOW2 images there easily but this is not the case with Windows. So, if you are looking for some free software to convert VMDK to QCOW2 then you have come to the right place. If you can handle command line tools pretty well then you can use qemu-img. Or, if you want to use simple GUI based software then you can use StarWind V2V Image Converter. And this post will help you in getting started with these free software.
NOTE: Depending on your hardware, you may need to boot the .vmdk file using VMware Workstation or Player before moving the file to the Proxmox VE server. This allows windows to install additional drivers for the disk controller. If promoted to convert the disk to Workstation 9.x compatibility, say Yes. You won't know if you need this step until starting the Windows VM in the final step. If you get a blue screen during boot, you should try this step.
In general, when you import your Microsoft Windows VM images into Amazon EC2, AWS will provide the appropriate Microsoft Windows Server license key for your imported instance. Hourly EC2 instance charges cover the Microsoft Windows Server software and underlying hardware resources. Your on-premise Microsoft Windows Server license key will not be used by EC2 and you are free to reuse it for other Microsoft Windows VM images within your on-premise environment. You are responsible for complying with the terms of your agreement(s) with Microsoft.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to convert between virtual machine image formats (including qcow2, vdi, vhd, and vmdk), so that you can take your virtual environments from your desktop to the cloud and back again as needed.
Raw virtual machine images are not compressed at all, so this command will actually create a full 10GB file, unlike before. You can convert it back to qcow2 format for use with QEMU by reversing the syntax from the last step:
function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1 + qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O qcow2 server2016.vmdk server2016.qcow2 + + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (qemu-img:String) [], CommandNotFoundException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException
StartWind V2V Converter is a third-party tool for converting disk from one format to another. Currently, it supports virtual-to-virtual and physical-to-virtual conversion by default. Most importantly, it is completely free and support various virtual disk formats, including VHD, VHDX, VMDK, QCOW2, IMG and RAW. The converted virtual disk can be used by all desktop virtual machine software, VMware ESXi server, Microsoft Hyper-V server, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Service.
For general purpose physical-to-virtual conversion, StartWind free tool V2V Converter is our top recommendation thanks to its various disk format support. And the user interface is well designed and easy to navigate. For virtual machine specific conversion, please choose the converter from the same brand of virtual machine software you are going to use.
I tried to use some conversion options like qemu-img convert -p -f qcow2 -O vmdk -o adapter_type=lsilogic,subformat=streamOptimized,compat6 win2008.qcow2 win2008.vmdk and tried moving between the 3 available scsi controllers (LSI Logic SAS, LSI Logic Parallel, VMware Paravirtual) to no avail.
I have been asked to do some debugging work with gnome-continuous, but as this only comes in qcow2 format for qemu and I do not want to install qemu at this time so this may be slightly problematic, though I have read here that one may be able to use qemu-img to convert a qcow2 image to a Virtual Box compatible one. I have tried install qemu-img with: 2ff7e9595c