Convert from VMware to QEMU

This is a quick and dirty quide to converting an Vmware disk file (.vmdk) to something usable by QEMU.

QEMU can actually use a vmdk file directly but it cannot be compressed like QCOW or benefit from snapshots.

Use qemu-img to perform the conversion to a more native format, qcow2. I add -c to compress and -p to show the progress.

qemu-img convert -c -p -O qcow2 vmname.vmdk vmname.qcow2