Qemu-img convert -f vmdk filename.vmdk filename.rawĢ. Open a Command Prompt window in the folder where the source VMDK file is, and run the following commands to convert the source VMDK file to raw image. Install and put both dd and qemu-img program in the system path. How to convert a VM into ISO file via QEMU-IMG commandġ.

I will introduce how to convert VM to ISO and V2P conversion both in this article. For example, you can backup the system and restore it to a physical machine. But if you are using Windows, you will need to resort to third party software.Īctually, if you just want to perform V2P conversion, there will be more choices. If you are using Linux, then you can convert VMDK to ISO by using dd and qemu-img commands. Unfortunately, there are few ways to do this. If you want to transfer all of your VM data to a physical machine, you may want to know if there is a way to convert VM to ISO image, which can be installed on any virtualization platform, as well as on bare metal. However, they cannot be recognized by Windows.

Question from As you may know, VMware Virtual Machine Disk files (VMDK) basically cover all VM data, and can be used for VMware ESXi clone VM.

Note that ISO as in ISO9660 has nothing to do with any of the above or your story / case.I have been working on a virtual machine for work, and I am wondering is there a way to convert a VM to an ISO file so that I could use this outside of a virtual environment, on a physical computer? I'm not familiar with tools on Windows though so I don't know if there's one can do that. It might even be possible to attach the VHDX of the installation (in read-only mode) to the host and perform a direct drive-to-drive clone.

If you have set up SMB share or so on the host, you can probably dump it directly over the virtual network to a volume on your host instead. Then you can use whatever writer tool you like on Windows to write the raw image to a USB flash drive. Unmount and shutdown detach the VHDX that contains the image from the VM and attach it to the host optionally perform a checksum (with 7-zip or whatever) and compare with the one you got in step 4.Use dd or even just cat to dump a raw image of the virtual disk where the installation resides to the filesystem mounted in step 3 you might even optionally use tee additionally to perform a checksum (e.g., sha1sum on-the-fly.Partition and format the virtual disk attached in step 1 as NTFS or exFAT and mount the filesystem.Attach a live iso to the VM and boot that instead of the installation.Create an attach another VHDX to the VM.I might do this instead to avoid any bug/flaw in any of the conversion tool:

To convert .vmdk to iso