Readme: Add section Creating Image for VMware (ESXi)

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Jakub Jirutka 2017-10-22 16:55:00 +02:00
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@ -36,6 +36,28 @@ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{gh-name}/v{version}/{script-name} \
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== Pitfalls
=== Creating Image for VMware (ESXi)
VMware and disk images (virtual disks) is one big mess.
You can find that VMware uses format VMDK, but the problem is that this is not a single format.
Actually it has many subformats with very different structure and various (in)compatibility with VMware hypervisors.
When I created disk image using `qemu-img create -f vmdk` or converted Qcow2 to VMDK using `qemu-img convert -O vmdk`, vSphere client loaded this image without any problem, but data was corrupted.
Eventually I found in some old documentation that ESXi does not support “sparse” disks…
So after many trials I found out that the least bad and functional solution is to create Qcow2 image and then convert it to VMDK using:
[source, sh]
qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O vmdk -o adapter_type=lsilogic,subformat=monolithicFlat alpine.qcow2 alpine.vmdk
Unfortunately this creates a “thick” image, i.e. its size equals the “provisioned space”, not actually used space as in Qcow2.
However, you can compress it with gzip to avoid transferring multiple gigabytes of zeros over network.
Also note that VMware has some problem with hardened kernel, so you have to boot it with `pax_nouderef` (read more https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Install_Alpine_on_VMware[here]).
== License
This project is licensed under http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT/[MIT License].