When download a sample VM image Today, to kick-start my cloudera learning journey, I finally downloaded a cloudera getting started image from cloudera official site. Well this image is not so huge, I still don’t have much space to store it on my local machine. As I have a ESX host siting several cubes away from my seat. I decide to upload the image to the host and run from there. Import a VM to ESX After play around the ESX client for some minutes, I find that I can only import an OVF or OVA image. Upload VM to ESX storage directly Alternatively, one have to upload the whole VM image by using the storage manager, then try to add the vmx file to inventory from there. As said, and sad, the image is a bit big, my VM image upload process end up successful, but the VM added from storage manager failed to start up. An error of “can not find vmdisk xxxx” with a mysterious vmdk filename showing up. Convert and then import, in one STEP The last solution for me to upload the image