Technical Memo: Convert an ova image to qcow2 format
From Wikipedia of Open Virtualization Format , I learnt that an the ova file is just a tar file of ovf directory. So I went open a Windows 10 Developer Evaluation ova file to see what exist inside it. $ tar -tf WinDev2001Eval.ova WinDev2001Eval.ovf WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.mf So inside the ova file includes A virtual machine specification definition .ovf file A hash checksum .mf file A disk image in .vmdk image As qemu-img supports vmdk as disk image file, we actually could convert vmdk file to any other format that we like. 1. Convert .vmdk to .img $ qemu-img convert -O raw WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.img 2. Convert .vmdk to .qcow2 $ qemu-img convert -O qcow2 WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.qcow2 All supported formats can be confirmed by qemu-img -h The converted qcow2 image could be used to create a new virtual machine using virt-manager. I used to think that .ova file is the file format of Virtual Box (There