Starting with version 1.4, VirtualBox also supports the popular and open VMDK container format that is now supported by a large number of virtualization products.
This means you can import your existing VMDK files by way of the Virtual Disk Manager just like existing VDI images; see Sectioná3.5, “The Virtual Disk Manager”. While VirtualBox fully supports using VMDK files in most situations, the more advanced features of virtual hard disks are presently not supported. In detail, with VMDK images,
you presently cannot create snapshots;
only write-through images are supported; immutable and normal hard disk are not.
These restrictions will be overcome in a future release. Creating VMDKs giving raw disk or raw partition access is already implemented; see Sectioná9.9, “Using a raw host hard disk from a guest”.