There are many ways that we can create disk images. QEMU can support many disk image formats. If you want to find details about the image formats that can be supported by QEMU, you can check using the following Linux command:
$ man qemu-img
The supported image formats are:
- raw: This plain disk image format has the advantage of being simple and easily exportable to all other emulators.
- qcow2: This is the QEMU image format, which is the most versatile format. It is a compressed image format, so it has a smaller image size and can support snapshots.
- qcow: This is the old QEMU image format.
- cow: This is the User Mode Linux Copy-On-Write image format.
- vdi: This is the VirtualBox 1.1-compatible image format.
- vmdk ...
