[Haifux] QEMU/KVM vs. VMWare: The beauty and the beast

[Eli Billauer]

Oron Peled wrote:

> It looks like there are solutions for converting VMWare disk images to
> KVM (Qemu) disk images. Few (untested) links:
>  <snip>
>   
The Virtual manager itself allows me to import VMWare images. Haven't tried.

Besides, VMWare allows you to boot from an arbitrary CDROM (read: Linux 
LiveCD) along with any of its own disks, empty or already filled. The CD 
can be added and removed at any time (and boot from disk later on). 
Since a network connection also exists, there is nothing stopping me 
from raw copying the disk from an external device or file, or the other 
way around.

So those limitations on what you can or can't do on disk images work 
only of those not familiar with dd and netcat.

Being trapped, as I see it, is trashing my old computers, only to find 
out a month later, that I'm limited in some crucial way unless I upgrade 
to a 1G$ version. And then wish I stayed with my good old computer.

By the way, I had a hard time finding out how to run VMPlayer from a raw 
disk image (made with dd), but it was obvious how to attach a "real 
disk". So I mounted my image on a loop device, gave VMPlayer the loop 
device's path, and off I went. I'm not even sure if I worked around one 
of their limitations. It was so easy, that I didn't waste my time on 
looking for a "straight way" to accomplish this.

   Eli

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