I received a single-file VMDK from a vendor that has a virtual appliance for a particular product I'm interested in evaluating.

We run a KVM solution (Proxmox) so I tried converting the file but on that system qemu-img blows up. (I was able to convert (multipart) VMDK files from bitnami without error.)

So I figured I'll just yum install qemu-img on a RHEL 6.3 VM and do it there. But despite the fact that I can file the file just fine when I run qemu-img on it I get this error that it can't open the file:

[root@host dir]# file 1.vmdk 
1.vmdk: VMware4 disk image
[root@host dir]# qemu-img info 1.vmdk 
qemu-img: Could not open 'vmdk'

I've seen some other people post on the interwebs that they've had this problem but none of them seem to have a resolution.

Does anyone have any ideas? I have checked the MD5SUM already.

EDIT1:

[root@host dir]# qemu-img info -f vmdk 1.vmdk 
qemu-img: Could not open '1.vmdk'

EDIT2:

Ran strace per suggestion. Not sure what to look for...

Here is a possible:

ioctl(3, CDROM_DRIVE_STATUS, 0x7fffffff) = -1 ENOTTY (Inappropriate ioctl for device)