How to move a VMWare-Server 'guest', to VMWare-Fusion?

[portuguesedanny]

Hi All,

I have a SUSE Enterprise Server 'guest' running on the free VMWare-Server. What is the best approach to import/migrate this 'guest' from vmware-server to vmware-fusion?

VMWare Importer/Converter mentions importing from Parrallel, but would it also work for the above situation?

TIA,

Danny

[Bob_Zimmerman]

There actually isn't much of a conversion process. You just copy the VM's files over to the Mac and open the .vmx file. If you want, you can rename that VM's directory to have the extension ".vmwarevm", which will make it show up like a single file in the Finder, but that isn't actually necessary.

Both VMware Server and VMware Fusion are based on the same codebase as Workstation (just different versions of it), so they all store their VMs in the same way. Since Server 1.x is based on a prior version of Workstation, you may be prompted to "upgrade" the virtual machine. That just converts it to using the latest virtualized hardware. I'm sure someone here knows the differences between the hardware versions better than I do.

[admin]

: Sharing a Virtual Machine Between Platforms

Just copy it over - the virtual machine format is compatible between VMware hosted products (though unless you're using Server 2, the virtual hardware will be older, so you won't be able to use new features like USB 2).

[rcardona2k]

Just a few more tips: 1. if you plan to copy your Server VM to a USB drive and run it from there, make sure you use a FAT32-formatted drive and convert the VMDK to split file format. If you copy it over via an NTFS drive, that's OK but you'll have to transfer it to your OS X (HFS+) drive before running it.

2.You should disconnect or remove many devices as possible, e.g. floppies, CD/DVDs, serial ports, etc and recreate them in Fusion, the reason being is you may have host-specific paths that won't map to paths on OS X.

3. As for the older virtual hardware, you can upgrade the hardware to v6 (Fusion/WS6 etc) (Virtual Machine > Upgrade virtual machine ), and that will allow you to add USB2 and other Fusion advanced options.

4. Finally don't forget to update the VMware Tools to the latest version in Fusion to take advantage of Unity, Shared Folders, Drag-n-Drop support, etc.

Good luck!