Booting a vmdk (or similar virtual machine disk) natively

Question

I've got a nice VMware Fusion setup on my Mac with a few different VMs. This works really nicely, but it gets really slow when running heavy programs. So I thought, why not boot into them directly? I know GRUB supports booting from disk images as loop devices, and Microsoft lets you boot from their VHD files. Can I do them same with vmdk files, vdi files, etc.?

I know I can partition my hard drive and multi boot, and then boot from each partition in VMware/VirtualBox, but triple booting (or maybe quadruple booting) seems a bit overkill, and I don't get to resize/delete partitions so easily.

PS: I know this has been asked before, but I couldn't find a concrete answer.

Solution

Yes it can be done. It is a bit complex, so I will simply refer you to the Web page from which I learned how to do it.

Strictly speaking, you cannot boot off a vmdk/vdi image directly (at least not to the best of my knowledge), but you can convert either into an iso image, and then boot off that. This is indeed why I needed to learn how to do it: after developing a rather complex software package, the easiest thing to distribute to my collaborators turned out to be an iso image, to be installed on either a VM or on bare metal.

Comments

[Admin]

If you know GRUB can do it then why not just install GRUB?

[user55325]

@Slowki because GRUB can only boot raw disk images (.iso or .img), not VMWare/Virtualbox disk images. I don't know of any way to do this without creating a raw disk image first. (The simplest way to do this, unless one of the management tools can do it automatically, is probably to just boot a live CD and then use dd.) EDIT: it looks like VBoxManage can do this, not sure about VMware.

[MacGyver]

Some distributions offer them for download. Example: mirror.phx1.us.spryservers.net/centos/8-stream/isos/x86_64