File formats

Running .ova packaged virtual appliances with KVM/QEMU

OVA is Open Virtual Appliance package, which is a tar archive containing .ovf descriptor file and typically one or more disk images, for example in .vmdk format. OVF file describes specifications for a virtual machine in XML format.

.ova file can be extracted with the following command:

tar xf $name_of_ova_file.ova

Then, .vmdk disk images can be converted to KVM/QEMU supported QCOW2 format with the following command:

qemu-img convert -O qcow2 $path_to_vmdk_file.vmdk $name_of_qcow2_file.qcow2

New VM can be then created from QCOW2 disk image using for example libvirt.

If there are multiple disk images in .ova, VM might need multiple disks to be attached.

Resources

• Open Virtualization Format - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtualization_Format

• Virtual appliance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_appliance