VMWare to Virtual Box Migration

Last week I switched from VMWare to Virtual Box at home. Why? Well, hack value mostly and I also wanted to learn more about Virtual Box having never used it before. Bottom line, for home use it suits me very nicely and is far easier to get installed and running when compared to VMWare Server which almost always required patching. The Virtual Box and Guest Additions (think VMWare Tools) installers both worked without a hitch. I even migrated my existing VMWare guests to Virtual Box, again everything went smoothly and my existing .vmdk disks worked just fine. I’ve summarised the steps involved when migrating from VMWare to Virtual Box in the wiki article below.

Posted on January 19, 2009 at 5:52 pm by Martin · Permalink
In: Virtualisation · Tagged with: , ,

3 Responses

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  1. Written by jh
    on January 19, 2009 at 8:43 pm
    Reply · Permalink

    I find that a modern qemu-img is a better solution for moving vmdk -> vdi, the main advantage being that is does not utterly corrupt the VM’s file system.

    e.g.

    $ qemu-img convert vm.vmdk -O VDI vm.vdi

    then maybe a new UUID

    $ VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid vm.vdi

  2. Written by Martin
    on January 19, 2009 at 11:15 pm
    Reply · Permalink

    Thanks for the tip. I’ll give that a try.

  3. Written by Martin
    on May 14, 2009 at 1:11 pm
    Reply · Permalink

    Hi.

    Nice tutorial you have there. Except one point. When I read that you successfully migrated a XP VM from VMWare to VirtualBox, I hoped that I could migrate my VM too.

    Unfortunatly, you only reinstalled XP. In my case, that is not realy an option. I use my XP VM for hardware and software development with commecrial tools that ar not running on linux. I want to migrate to VirtualBox mainly because of performance issues with VMWare Server. And besides, I don’t realy like VMWare Server.

    If I reinstall XP, I would have to reinstall all that software (and register it again). That is hardly possible because I got the VMWare Machine from my applicant and do not have full access to the software licences by myself.

    I tried to mirgrate by creating a new VB machine using the hard disks of the VMWare machine, but I cannot get the new machine to boot correctly. After the bootloader, I see nothing than a black screen with a single “_”.

    Do you know any further resources about that issue?

    Regards
    Martin

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