VMDK vs qcow2
A side-by-side feature comparison.
Summary
VMDK is the universal hypervisor disk format; qcow2 is the QEMU/KVM native one. Both support sparse files and snapshots, but qcow2's richer cluster-level features (encryption, deduplication, internal snapshots) make it the default choice on Linux KVM.
Feature comparison
| Feature | VMDK | QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write) |
|---|---|---|
| Native to | VMware | QEMU/KVM |
| Snapshots | External (delta files) | Internal |
| Encryption | Limited | LUKS-equivalent |
| Sparse | Yes | Yes |
| Compression | streamOptimized only | Per-cluster zlib |
| Cross-hypervisor support | Universal | Convert with qemu-img |
About VMDK
VMDK is VMware's virtual disk format and the most portable VM disk in the industry. Public cloud OVF templates and Vagrant boxes ship as VMDKs because every hypervisor reads them. The streamOptimized variant uses per-chunk zlib so VMDKs can be downloaded over HTTP and streamed straight into a hypervisor without intermediate decompression.
About QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write)
QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write version 2) is the native virtual disk format of QEMU and the default for KVM-based clouds like OpenStack. It supports snapshots, internal compression, AES encryption, and copy-on-write backing files for cheap VM cloning.
Read the full QCOW2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write) guide →
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