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

[Seb James]

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

[Anthony Liguori (anthony-codemonkey)]

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.

[Seb James (sebjames)]

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.

[Anthony Liguori (anthony-codemonkey)]

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.

[Seb James (sebjames)]

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.

[Rob White (rwhite-pobox)]

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.

[Stefan Hajnoczi (stefanha)]

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

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

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?

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

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"

[Seb James (sebjames)]

Great news!