So you’ve got a Linux VM that you want to access the contents of in EC2 - how do you do it? Let’s see how. First up, convert the VMDK to raw image file. If you’ve got a ova/ovf then just untar it first (tar -xvf my_vm.ova), from which you should get the VMDK. With that, convert it using qemu-img:

$ time qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw SampleAppv607p-appliance-disk1.vmdk SampleAppv607p-appliance-disk1.raw

real    16m36.740s
user    6m44.136s
sys     0m11.000s

Inspect the image file: