Fusion VM to VMware Workstation migration

[NeilBradley]

I am going to abandon the Mac/Fusion pair for my FreeBSD machine and put it back as a VM running under Windows with VMware Workstation 5.x. The question is, are the VMs compatible? Can I simply move the VM over to VMware Workstation 5 and load it up, or are there going to be compatibility problems? Or will I need to upgrade to Workstation 6?

Thanks!

[BP9906]

The VMDK is the same structure. The VMX file (config file inside the vmwarevm package) is of the same nature for Workstation 6, but you'll have to fix any path references to a c:\ windows type path, instead of a Unix ~/home/... path.

All other files in the vmwarevm are unnecessary (unless you have snapshots of course, then there's more files than that, but still compatible).

As for Workstation 5, there might be some changes in the VMX file contents between v5 and v6 (and I know Fusion was built using the v6 backbone). I might suggest just moving the VMDK over and create a new VM on Workstation 5 and point it to your existing VMDK.

[rcardona2k]

Fusion is compatible with Workstation 6 and Server 2.0 (beta). It's not backwards compatible with Workstation 5.0 or 5.5.x. If you have these versions Workstation 6 can "downgrade" your VM. But if you have Workstation 5, you might as well upgrade to WS6 since that's what you would need to downgrade in the first place. It's kind of a catch-22.

[admin]

You could use the 30-day trial of Workstation 6 to downgrade the VM.