QEMU Version Compatibility

Before qemu 1.2.0 qemu-img cannot read streamOptimized vmdk images. Install 1.2.0 or newer to work with them.

After qemu 1.6.0 qemu-img will refuse to read a vmdk version 3 disk image. This is not a problem for earlier qemu releases, and it will be fixed in a future qemu release. As a workaround, you can safely change your vmdk version 3 images to version 2 using this script from Erik Smit. Thanks to Matthieu Coudron for reporting this issue and the workaround.