[2024-feb-29] Sad news: Eric Layton aka Nocturnal Slacker aka vtel57 passed away on Feb 26th, shortly after hospitalization. He was one of our Wiki's most prominent admins. He will be missed.

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howtos:cloud:aws_ec2 [2020/07/07 00:56 (UTC)] – [Security] bifferoshowtos:cloud:aws_ec2 [2020/07/07 00:59 (UTC)] (current) – [Disk Formats] bifferos
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 Stream optimised VMDK is the most efficient way to upload your image.  This is the VMDK format created when you export to OVF format from VMWare and you will notice it’s much more compressed than normal VMDK files.  Don’t upload a standard VMDK file, it won’t work and you’ll waste your time.  Also, don’t try to generate stream-optimised VMDK using any open-source utilities.  None of them seem to work properly.  If you don’t own a VMWare product with the ‘export to OVF’ option, you could try OVFTool.  This is a free download from VMWare for registered users, and will take a VMWare VM directory as input.  I’m unsure if it requires a registered copy of VMWare to run but it will expect the .VMX and possibly other files which you’ll have to generate somehow to keep it happy if you're not actually using VMWare.  When the OVF directory is generated it will be generated containing several files.  You can discard all but the .VMDK. Stream optimised VMDK is the most efficient way to upload your image.  This is the VMDK format created when you export to OVF format from VMWare and you will notice it’s much more compressed than normal VMDK files.  Don’t upload a standard VMDK file, it won’t work and you’ll waste your time.  Also, don’t try to generate stream-optimised VMDK using any open-source utilities.  None of them seem to work properly.  If you don’t own a VMWare product with the ‘export to OVF’ option, you could try OVFTool.  This is a free download from VMWare for registered users, and will take a VMWare VM directory as input.  I’m unsure if it requires a registered copy of VMWare to run but it will expect the .VMX and possibly other files which you’ll have to generate somehow to keep it happy if you're not actually using VMWare.  When the OVF directory is generated it will be generated containing several files.  You can discard all but the .VMDK.
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 +<note tip>Ensure you've shutdown VMWare completely and removed any DVD-ROMs from the VM before exporting to OVF or it may fail with a cryptic (e.g. useless) error message as is typical from VMWare.</note>
  
 If you don't have VMWare, and/or don't want to use OVFTool then you should consider .VHD format.  This format was used by the ancient Microsoft emulator called VirtualPC, and latterly HyperV.  qemu-img will happily generate one of these when you specify the ‘vpc’ output format.  VHD is more verbose than stream-optimised VMDK and will end up about double the size, so double the upload time, and higher S3 charges while importing (not that they will amount to much).  You can also use VHDX format as AWS also supports that but there is little point as the generated files are even larger than VHD to contain the same information. If you don't have VMWare, and/or don't want to use OVFTool then you should consider .VHD format.  This format was used by the ancient Microsoft emulator called VirtualPC, and latterly HyperV.  qemu-img will happily generate one of these when you specify the ‘vpc’ output format.  VHD is more verbose than stream-optimised VMDK and will end up about double the size, so double the upload time, and higher S3 charges while importing (not that they will amount to much).  You can also use VHDX format as AWS also supports that but there is little point as the generated files are even larger than VHD to contain the same information.
 howtos:cloud:aws_ec2 ()