Converting the machine image

Please make sure you have converted your image to RAW before uploading it to our cloud. While QCOW2 images will also work, they will not support copy-on-write operations. As a result, launching compute instances from these images or taking snapshots will take longer.

Tools for image conversion

Ensure you have the qemu-utils package installed, as it provides the tools required to convert the disk images.

On Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install qemu-utils

On Fedora or CentOS:

sudo yum install qemu-img

Converting to RAW

From KVM QCOW2 to RAW

On a host with QEMU installed, convert the QCOW2 disk to a RAW disk:

qemu-img convert -O raw kvm-image.qcow2 raw-image.raw

From VMWare VMDK to RAW

On a host with QEMU installed, convert the VMDK disk to a RAW disk:

qemu-img convert -O raw vmware-image.vmdk raw-image.raw