In this video, you will learn about file formats for VMs and cloud.
So for working with VMs and cloud instances, different file formats have been introduced
to guarantee that settings can be stored efficiently and also there is some interoperability every
now and then.
The file formats may support compression and include metadata that describes the virtual
machine or cloud instance.
And to work with VMs between different platforms, it may be needed to convert the format before
the VM can be imported in the new platform.
A useful utility in that context is QEMU Image Convert, that's a generic tool that you can
use for image conversion.
Like for instance QEMU Image Convert –f QCOW2, so that identifies the format as QCOW2.
And –o VMDK defines the output format.
And then you have the name of the original disk and the name of the target disk.
Now there are different file formats available, where VMDK is the standard virtual disk format
in VMware.
It is widely used and well supported.
VHD and VHDX is what you find as the default format in Hyper-V and Azure environments.
QCOW2 is the default format in open source QEMU, KVM and OpenStack.
ROL and IMAGE are ROL formats that have not been compressed and that don't contain metadata
typically.
VDI is what you find in Oracle VirtualBox and AMI is a bundle of files that represents
an instance in Amazon EC2.