On Fri, Apr 7, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Laurentiu Pancescu <lpancescu at gmail.com> wrote: >> We should probably either: >> - call GNU tar from Image Factory to preserve the sparseness of our image >> files (and hope that Windows handles them properly) >> - use VBoxManage to convert to .vhd (VirtualBox is not in our repos, but >> Oracle offers a .rpm for EL7 systems). > > > 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: centos7-hyperv (original image): 4m19.232s kozo/centos-7: 51.069s centos7-hyperv (converted with virtualbox): 48.041s So I would also say the second option is the way to go if possible :)