File size increases on disk image conversion with qemu-img

I downloaded two Ubuntu cloud image files xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img (294M) and xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.vmdk (282M) from . I modified the .img to make it work on VirtualBox and then converted the file to .vmdk using qemu-img as follows:

qemu-img convert -f qcow2 -O vmdk xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1.img xenial-server-cloudimg-amd64-disk1-new.vmdk

I noticed that file size of the converted .vmdk file increases to 1GB. I want to have the file size more or less the same as the original file. Did I miss something here? Since I am relatively novice to image formats and conversion tools, I appreciate for any useful information on tools and techniques to achieve this.

Sorted by: Reset to default

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