CONVERT OVA TO QCOW2

Hello! In this quick tutorial, I will show you how to convert an OVA file to a QCOW2.

A few days ago I have to install Windows in a virtual environment to test some stuff. Then, I found that Microsoft provides some test images officially at https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/, but there are no images to use with KVM. So, what if it would be possible to convert some provided formats to a KVM-compatible format?

Well, this is possible and much easier than I thought it was. Follow me!

Extract the image

First, we have to extract the files from the OVA file.

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tar -xvf MSEdge-Win10.ova

An OVA file is an Open Virtualization Appliance that contains a compressed version of a virtual machine.

Now we have two files:

• MSEdge - Win10-disk001.vmdk
• MSEdge - Win10.ovf

Converting the image

To convert the .vmdk file to a .qcow2 file to import into KVM we just have to use the qemu-img command as follows.

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qemu-img convert MSEdge-Win10-disk001.vmdk the_name_you_want.qcow2 -O qcow2

Observe that I’ve renamed the file MSEdge - Win10-disk001.vmdk to remove the blank spaces. I always do this before working with files in the command line, and you should too.

That’s it! Now we can just move our converted the_name_you_want.qcow2 to the images’ directory which is usually /var/lib/libvirt/images, but you can place it wherever you wish and import it.