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Jun 15 2012

VMware’s VMDK to VirtualBox’s VDI

I recently had to demonstrate some web application security concepts and so decided to use OWASP Broken Web Apps project. The problem was that this came in VMware’s VMDK format while I use VirtualBox. Fortunately there is the command-line VBoxManage tool included in VirtualBox’s Linux distribution which can create a clone of a virtual hard disk from one format to another. So here is the command to create a new VirtualBox VDI disk from a VMware’s VMDK disk:

VBoxManage clonehd original-disk.vmdk new-disk.vdi --format VDI --variant Standard
  • George

    Why do you want to convert the image even though VirtualBox can open vmdk files? I am asking because i am wondering if there is any difference ;)

    • http://bruteforce.gr Ion

      Hello George. AFAIK, there is no difference, in the sense that VirtualBox fully supports both formats. But I was getting some errors when trying to attach the disk to a new virtual machine in BT5 (I later saw some forum posts instructing to mount it as IDE and not SATA, unistall vmware tools, etc, which could solve the issues but never tried them), so I decided to just convert it and get on with it. I was doing the web application security presentation which you can find on the main page and I was in a hurry :)