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In this video, you will learn about file formats for VMs and cloud.

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So for working with VMs and cloud instances, different file formats have been introduced

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to guarantee that settings can be stored efficiently and also there is some interoperability every

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now and then.

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The file formats may support compression and include metadata that describes the virtual

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machine or cloud instance.

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And to work with VMs between different platforms, it may be needed to convert the format before

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the VM can be imported in the new platform.

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A useful utility in that context is QEMU Image Convert, that's a generic tool that you can

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use for image conversion.

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Like for instance QEMU Image Convert –f QCOW2, so that identifies the format as QCOW2.

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And –o VMDK defines the output format.

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And then you have the name of the original disk and the name of the target disk.

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Now there are different file formats available, where VMDK is the standard virtual disk format

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in VMware.

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It is widely used and well supported.

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VHD and VHDX is what you find as the default format in Hyper-V and Azure environments.

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QCOW2 is the default format in open source QEMU, KVM and OpenStack.

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ROL and IMAGE are ROL formats that have not been compressed and that don't contain metadata

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typically.

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VDI is what you find in Oracle VirtualBox and AMI is a bundle of files that represents

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an instance in Amazon EC2.