The table below lists the supported file formats and variations with a short description.
Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk fixed | vhd | Storage capacity taken by the virtual disk is allocated to the size of the virtual disk |
Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk dynamic | vhd | Disk space for this image file is allocated on demand. |
Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk v2 fixed | vhdx | Disk space is allocated to the image file at its creation time. |
Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk v2 dynamic | vhdx | Disk space for this image is allocated on demand. |
QEMU qcow2 disk image | qcow2 | Native disk format for QEMU hypervisor. |
Raw disk image | img | Raw disk image, sector-to-sector copy of the disk. It can be used with StarWind Virtual SAN, dd, and other disk utilities. |
VMware ESXi growable image | vmdk | Disk space for this image is allocated on demand. |
VMware ESXi pre-allocated image | vmdk | Disk space for this image is allocated during its creation. |
VMware ESXi stream-optimized image | vmdk | Monolithic sparse format compressed for streaming. It can be used with OVF packages. |
VMware Workstation growable image | vmdk | Disk space for this image is allocated on demand. Not compatible with ESXi Server. |
VMware Workstation pre-allocated image | vmdk | Disk space for this image is allocated during its creation. Not compatible with ESXi Server. |
For ESXi and Hyper-V servers, it is possible to convert directly a file without copying it to the machine where the utility is launched.
Data transmission over the network is done between remote servers and the machine where the hypervisor is running, disk operations are performed only on the server hosting the file.
The virtual disk can be immediately connected to an existing virtual machine or simply written to the specified directory on the server.
Steps for converting between Microsoft Hyper-V Server and Remote VMware ESXi Server.