maybe they don’t contain a traditional bootloader and hardware support needed to run on a multitude of physical hardware. One more note, as far as I understand it, cloud images are optimized in some way to running in a VM. But for just one VM I find doing a usual install from an installation ISO is more straightforward. Though as far as I understand, you can take a cloud image, the add to it all the packages you need – and end with basically the same Fedora Server as a result. But I’ve never played with them, so can’t advise on their usage.

ISO installerĬloud images, on the other side, are intended to be run directly, without usual full installation process.

That’s the thought behind my initial reply )) Cloud images vs. To get a useful VM you still need to perform an installation. So – as far as I understand it – there’s no useful purpose in directly converting from ISO to vmdk. ) Exactly as booting your VM from the ISO does. You launch it – and it asks you where do you want to install it. Not a running useful Fedora Server system ( virtual system) – an installation media. So you’ll get a virtual hard drive containing Fedora installer. What can you get by converting ISO file to vmdk file? ISO is a cd/dvd image, vmdk is a hard drive image. About directly converting ISO to VMDKĪnd back to your initial question. And for making one or two copies or moving it to different physical host there are built-in tools in VM managers – usually called cloning and migrating. And snapshot will allow you to roll back to know state later – let’s say after some experimenting with your VM. If you need a VM on this one host – then the way you did it is a good one. If you want to copy your virtual machine to other hosts, you need more that vmdk itself, you need all the properties of your VM (how many processor cores it uses, how much ram, what kind of hardware is emulated, which network controller with which network settings is used, etc.) – and as far as I know it’s not contained in the vmdk.įor running and managing many VM’s (maybe from all from one base image) – there are professional tools indeed, but I’ve never used them. The key question, I think, is what for do you want to use this vmdk image? VMDK and copying/moving VMs to other hosts.Īs far as I understand it, vmdk itself is a hard drive image, it’s like a virtual hard drive. Also I’ve never used VMWare, I’ve used VirtualBox and KVM/qemu. To tell the truth I don’t know about professional way and how companies do it ) And I would be interested to hear from people in the know.

Vmdk to iso converter