I have the following rather unusual demand for which I couldn't find any suggestion everywhere else, so I'm trying here... I have a VmWare virtual machine with opensolaris 06/09. I used a physical disk as the vm hard-disk both because I hoped in better performance and because I need to use the same virtual machine on Windows and Mac (where, with a bit of manual vmx file hacking, I was able to use the physical disk in Fusion). Now, I'd like to know if it's possible, and how, to create a normal "dynamic" vmdk file out of the physical disk the opensolaris VM runs from. NOTE: I don't think that's the same of converting a physical machine to a virtual one (but correct me if I'm wrong). What I'm trying to do is convert the physical disk I used to host the vm operating system into a standard (i.e. "file-based" vmdk grow-on-demand disk). Any help/hint/suggestion? Thanks, Andrea.
1 Answer
With the commandline tool 'qemu-img' you can convert raw images / disks to vmdk files. This tool is available on several Linux live CDs.