Convert OVA Image to QCOW2 Image (QEMU, virt-manager)

A lot of Linux image are passed around as ova file. All that is required is to download and use Virtual Box but you may prefere QEMU.

I’ve used ova file before but didn’t realize it’s just an archive, which means it can ve open with tar.

tar -xvf my-image.ova

This give us a bunch of file, including a vmdk which we want to convert to qcow2 image.

This may take a while:

qemu-img convert my-image-disk001.vmdk my-image.qcow2 -O qcow2

Check if the convertion was successful:

file my-image.qcow2

This should output something similar:

my-image.qcow2: QEMU QCOW2 Image (v3), 10000 bytes

You now have a qcow2 image you can use with Virt-Manager!