From Wikipedia of Open Virtualization Format, I learned that an the ova file is just a tar file of ovf directory. So I went open a Windows 10 Developer Evaluation ova file to see what exist inside it. $ tar -tf WinDev2001Eval.ova WinDev2001Eval.ovf WinDev2001Eval-disk001.vmdk WinDev2001Eval.mf So inside the ova file includes A virtual machine specification definition .ovf file A hash checksum .mf file A disk image in .vmdk image As qemu-img supports vmdk as disk image file, we actually could convert vmdk file to any other format that we like.

Background Recently, I received a really interesting question from my customer. He found out in his file system two files (directories), which belong to an user that not in /etc/passwd. Specifically in Ubuntu Linux 18.04, these 2 files are /var/lib/private/systemd /var/lib/private/systemd/timesync These two files belong to a user named systemd-timesync with UID/GID in 62583 and this user does not belong to /etc/passwd. Traditionally, a Linux user does not always need to be in /etc/passwd because it can come from many remote sources, for example