Blackkettle

Today I’ve been mostly bringing a new subcontractor up to speed on a project I’ve been working on for a while. It’s quite a fun project that I’ll probably post about at some later date (think _why’s mousehole on steroids), but what I’ve spent most of my time on is wrangling virtual machine images.

For me, kvm is the first (free) virtual machine host system that makes everything Just Work. I always had problems with UML and Xen, qemu was too slow, and I always shied away from VMware. Not entirely sure why, but there you go.

Now, back to this contractor: he’s on Windows, I’m on Ubuntu Gutsy. I know that my code won’t work on Windows, because I’m daemonising and fork()ing all over the place. VMs to the rescue! It looks to me like the best combination is kvm on my side, and VirtualBox on his. There’s a very simple conversion that lets me convert my qcow image to a vmdk that VirtualBox can read:

qemu-img convert etch-rodents-i386.img -O vmdk etch-rodents-i386.vmdk

I’ve not seen this documented anywhere; most google hits mention the obsolete vditool, which I couldn’t get to run on my 64-bit host anyway.

Added bonus: the vmdk image is slightly smaller than the qcow. Win.