qemu-img should be able to create scsi based vmdk images

qemu-img can create vmdk disk images. These are always created as "ide" disks; that is, the paramter ddb.adapterType is set to "ide" in the .vmdk file.

I needed to create a scsi style vmdk image, in which ddb.adapterType is set to "lsilogic".

The attached patch (against qemu-0.12.3) allows me to convert a raw image into a scsi vmdk image:

 qemu-img convert -O vmdk -o scsi rootfs.raw rootfs.vmdk

The "scsi" option works also for the "create" command.

I hope very much that this change can be rolled into qemu.

best,

Seb James



This has been presented on qemu-devel before.  We didn't feel this was appropriate for qemu because 1) it's an invasive change 2) these images are not useful when using qemu--only useful for creating images for use with VMware.

I'll leave this as wishlist, but at this time, we're not interested in supporting this feature.

So it has - by Soren Hansen: http://<email address hidden>/msg15054.html

In what sense is the change invasive, in your opinion? It seems like a fairly minor addition of a command line option to me.

I, at least, find this patch very useful. My company builds network print appliances and our build scripts use qemu-img to create both qcow2 images for Linux KVM/qemu platforms and also vmdk disk images for those of our customers who insist on using vmware ;)

Thanks for your reply.

Block flags are a limited space.  We should have never taken the COMPAT6 support for the same reason.

If the change could be entirely contained to the vmdk driver, it would be more palatable.

Thanks for the explanation. There's an int for the block flags, so I guess there are nominally 32 flags available and 3 in use (including the compat6 flag)... unless qemu-img needs to be compilable on 16 or 8 bit machines?

It looks like a fair amount of work to make this change entirely contained in the vmdk driver. I'll continue to maintain the patch against qemu.

Those of us who have vmdk images bestowed upon us and would prefer to run them under qemu would very like to have a way to convert the images in both directions.

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 1:09 AM, Rob White <email address hidden> wrote:
>  The attached patch (against qemu-0.12.3) allows me to convert a raw
>  image into a scsi vmdk image:
>
>   qemu-img convert -O vmdk -o scsi rootfs.raw rootfs.vmdk

Please rebase onto qemu.git/master.

Please see this wiki page on how to submit patches to QEMU:
http://wiki.qemu.org/Contribute/SubmitAPatch

Stefan


Modern qemu has this and more:
qemu-img convert -O vmdk -o ? source dest.vmdk
Supported options:
size             Virtual disk size
adapter_type     Virtual adapter type, can be one of ide (default), lsilogic, buslogic or legacyESX
backing_file     File name of a base image
compat6          VMDK version 6 image
subformat        VMDK flat extent format, can be one of {monolithicSparse (default) | monolithicFlat | twoGbMaxExtentSparse | twoGbMaxExtentFlat | streamOptimized} 
zeroed_grain     Enable efficient zero writes using the zeroed-grain GTE feature

So perhaps this patch went mainstream after all?

This seems to be fixed by this commit here:
http://git.qemu.org/?p=qemu.git;a=commitdiff;h=7f2039f61113f11be9211
==> Setting status to "Fix released"

Great news!