Tag Archive for 'QEMU.'

Time Machine and Virtual Machines

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  • spanish

A small detail about Time Machine I hadn’t thought about before: this article recommends removing all the virtual disks from virtual machines like VMWare, Virtual Box, et al. from the backup.

Makes sense: Time Machine works at a file level, in the end it’s just something like this but with an über-posh interface. So every time you boot one of your VMs, some small change will inevitably be made on some file inside it, causing Time Machine to store a new copy of the full virtual disk.

VMWare to Virtual Box: vmdk2vdi

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  • spanish

I’ve been playing around a little bit with the MacOS X port of Virtual Box, and it looks really promising. Speed-wise it runs quite OK, I couldn’t tell wether or not it’s on par with VMWare Fusion. But I’ve had small problems with the keyboard (couldn’t get the alt and command keys to work right) and the “desktop resolution resizing” when in windowed mode.

Following these instrucions,  I’ve made a small shell-script that converts a .vmdk disk image file from VMWare to a .vdi one for Virtual Box. It should detect the OS (Mac or Linux) and warn you in case you miss some of the dependencies (QEMU ’s qemu-img and Virtual Box’s vditool). It can be downloaded here:




Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Spain
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 Spain