VMware VMs and VirtualBox

Čtvrtek VII 24, 2008

This entry is part of Mastering Sun xVM VirtualBox

VMware VMs & Virtual Appliances formats

VMware VMs and Virtual Appliances are distributed in following formats VMware VMX/VMDK or Interoperable OVF format

• VMware native format
  • VMX - VM defintion
  • VMDK - Virtual Disk definition and data

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format)
  • Open Virtualization Format Datasheet
  • Citrix and Microsoft to embrace the OVF standard

Inspecting Solaris VMware Virtual Appliance configuration

1. VMDK - Virtual Disk format

ls *.vmdk

Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s001.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s002.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s003.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s004.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s005.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s006.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s007.vmdk
Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s008.vmdk

du -s -h Solaris\ 10\ u5\ 64-bit\ Console

704M    Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console

cat "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console.vmdk"

# Disk DescriptorFile
version=1
CID=04f9d350
parentCID=ffffffff
createType="twoGbMaxExtentSparse"

# Extent description
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s001.vmdk"
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s002.vmdk"
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s003.vmdk"
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s004.vmdk"
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s005.vmdk"
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s006.vmdk"
RW 4192256 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s007.vmdk"
RW 2111488 SPARSE "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console-s008.vmdk"

# The Disk Data Base
#DDB

ddb.virtualHWVersion = "4"
ddb.geometry.cylinders = "16383"
ddb.geometry.heads = "16"
ddb.geometry.sectors = "63"
ddb.adapterType = "ide"

Virtual disk is in 2GB sparse format, size is 4192256*7+ 2111488 = 31457280 in 512B sector sizes, so max disk size is 15GB.

2. VMX - VM defintion

cat Solaris\ 10\ 64-bit.vmx

memsize = "1024"
ide0:0.fileName = "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console.vmdk"
Ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
displayName = "Solaris 10 u5 64-bit Console"
guestOS = "solaris10-64"

So this VM is use 1024Bm of memory, Disk use IDE emulation and network card emulaed "Intel e1000", by default is use VMware "bridge" networking.

VirtualBox 1.6.2 & VMware formats

VirtualBox 1.62 can use directly VMware virtual disk format VMDK, but with some important limitations like:

• you presently cannot create snapshots
• only write-through images are supported; immutable and normal hard disk are not supported.

VirtualBox 1.6.2 can't import VMX - VM definitions files so we need to create VM configuration manually based on infrmation in VMX file.

OVF format can't be currently parsed by VirtualBox 1.6.2, so it's need to be converted to VMX/VMDK definitions with Java based conversion OVF tool available from VMware.

Note: Starting from VirtualBox 2.1 VMDK is fully supported.

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Posted at 02:47odp. VII 24, 2008 by natiku in Virtualization
Tags: kvm opensolaris parallels qemu virtualbox virtualpc xen