qemu-img: Could not open $FILE

Question

I received a single-file VMDK from a vendor that has a virtual appliance for a particular product I'm interested in evaluating.

We run a KVM solution (Proxmox) so I tried converting the file but on that system qemu-img blows up. (I was able to convert (multipart) VMDK files from bitnami without error.)

So I figured I'll just yum install qemu-img on a RHEL 6.3 VM and do it there. But despite the fact that I can file the file just fine when I run qemu-img on it I get this error that it can't open the file:

[root@host dir]# file 1.vmdk 
1.vmdk: VMware4 disk image
[root@host dir]# qemu-img info 1.vmdk 
qemu-img: Could not open 'vmdk'

I've seen some other people post on the interwebs that they've had this problem but none of them seem to have a resolution.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have checked the MD5SUM already.

EDIT1:

[root@host dir]# qemu-img info -f vmdk 1.vmdk 
qemu-img: Could not open '1.vmdk'

EDIT2:

Ran strace per suggestion. Not sure what to look for...

Here is a possible:

ioctl(3, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = -1 ENOTTY (Inappropriate ioctl for device)

Solution

I had a similar problem with a file which was given to me. I was said that the file was in qcow format. Here is what I tried first :

% qemu-img convert -f qcow2 box.img -O vdi box.vdi                                                        
qemu-img: Could not open 'box.img': Invalid argument
qemu-img: Could not open 'box.img'
% qemu-img convert -f qcow box.img -O vdi box.vdi                                                         
qemu-img: Could not open 'box.img': Operation not permitted
qemu-img: Could not open 'box.img'

Omiting the file input format finaly worked fine :

% qemu-img convert -O vdi box.img box.vdi

Comments

[mgorven]

Try qemu-img info -f vmdk 1.vmdk.

[mgorven]

Try run it under strace to see what's happening: strace -vvvs4096 qemu-img ....

[Michael Hampton]

In my experience, qemu-img has only been able to handle thick-provisioned "flat" VMDK files, i.e. the entire disk image in a single file. I recommend converting the disk image to raw before trying to use it.

[David Corsalini]

vmware keep changing their vmdk format to make it harder to run these VMs on any other solution, the common practice is to quickly set up a free ESXi machine, import the appliance and then convert it to your KVM system using virt-v2v