Teradata Express Edition: Converting from VMware to VirtualBox
The Teradata Express Edition is a great opportunity to experiment with a fully functional Teradata system. It can be downloaded from https://downloads.teradata.com/download/database.
Unfortunately, only VMware is supported as the virtualization software. As a user of Oracle's VirtualBox, I looked for a way to convert VMware images into VirtualBox images.
After unpacking the zip file containing the Teradata Express Edition 14.10, you will find the three files needed by VMware:
sda.vmdk, PDISK0.vmdk and PDISK1.vmdk
Changing the file format from VMware to VirtualBox is relatively straightforward. The conversion process was tested with VirtualBox 4.3.10.
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- Open a Windows shell (run the cmd command)
- Change the current directory to where your VirtualBox software is installed. In my case, this is:
cd C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox
Run the conversion program from your VirtualBox installation. Be sure to convert both the Linux installation and the two virtual disks (VDISKs). The {PATH} variable must point to the directory where the Teradata Express Edition files were extracted.
VBoxManage {PATH}\sda.vmdk {PATH}\sda.vdi --format VDI
VBoxManage {PATH}\PDISK0.vmdk {PATH}\PDISK0.vdi --format VDI
VBoxManage {PATH}\PDISK1.vmdk {PATH}\PDISK1.vdi --format VDI
These commands generate VirtualBox images that can be added directly to VirtualBox. Note that the converted images are significantly larger than the original VMware images. In my case, the original files were roughly 11 GB; after conversion, they totaled over 31 GB.
After this conversion, I successfully installed Teradata Express Edition 14.10 on VirtualBox.
Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions about the conversion and installation process.
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Written by Roland Wenzlofsky, founder of DWHPro and author of Teradata Query Performance Tuning. DWHPro has helped data warehouse practitioners for 15+ years.