From 14033a86af81262e171cb343ce12002f9c4edb59 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jakub Jirutka Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2017 16:55:00 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Readme: Add section Creating Image for VMware (ESXi) --- README.adoc | 22 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 22 insertions(+) diff --git a/README.adoc b/README.adoc index 343b90a..b578d5e 100644 --- a/README.adoc +++ b/README.adoc @@ -36,6 +36,28 @@ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{gh-name}/v{version}/{script-name} \ || exit 1 +== 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].