On 10/04/17 16:57, Michael Vermaes wrote: > On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Laurentiu Pancescu <lpancescu at gmail.com> wrote: >> I would prefer the second option, using VBoxManage to produce small >> non-sparse .VHD images for our Vagrant boxes, and avoid the compatibility >> problems posed by sparse files. But this would need to be done in Image >> Factory, so it's actually for Ian to decide if using VirtualBox is >> acceptable. > > After using qemu-img to convert the qcow2 image to VHD and then > extracting the resulting tar file on the Hyper V host, the resulting > image was back to being 40GB 'non-sparse'. > > Using VBoxManage instead, 'vagrant up' time was reduced to be > comparable to the kozo/centos7 box: [snip] > So I would also say the second option is the way to go if possible :) qemu-img has several options for the vpc and vhdx formats ("qemu-img convert -O vpc -o ?" will show them). Earlier today I tried all possible combinations of subformat, preallocation and block_state_zero, without any visible effect: it always produces sparse files for vpc (.vhd) and huge non-sparse file for .vhdx. qemu-img seems to be right to produce sparse .vhd files, if I correctly understand the documentation from libvhdi. [1] VirtualBox doesn't, but what they're doing seems to work better in practice. [1] https://github.com/libyal/libvhdi/blob/master/documentation/Virtual%20Hard%20Disk%20(VHD)%20image%20format.asciidoc#4-block-table Any thoughts about using VBoxManage to convert the images to .vhd? VirtualBox supports neither .vhdx nor QCOW2, so we'd need to convert via .vmdk or another format.