Is it possible to convert a VMWare vmdk image file to physical hardisk drive

vmware-vmdk

Is it possible to convert a VMWare vmdk image file to physical hardisk drive? I know VMWare 6.5 can use physical harddisk drive directly to get good performance, can I convert an existing vmdk file to physical harddisk drive go gain better performance?

Best Answer

If you have qemu-img, you should be able to do all of this from a command line dealing just with image files.

qemu-img convert source.vmdk -O raw <path>
dd if=<path> of=/dev/<disk> bs=1G count=<target-gb-size>

That will write out whatever raw format the vmdk was out to a physical drive. Its better to use copy-on-write FS for this. Make sure that all source data allocated within first N Gb to fit the target disk of N-Gb size.

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