The cleanest way to go in my opinion since you already have a working macOS 10.13 VM would be to:

• Install Xcode, the Xcode command line tools and MacPorts on your VM,
• Get a list of the ports that you have installed on your old system
• Re-install the ports in the VM

The MacPorts site has a procedure used to migrate a MacPorts installation after a major OS upgrade or from one computer to another. This procedure is found at https://trac.macports.org/wiki/Migration and includes a process of listing the installed ports on the old environment and reinstalling them on a new environment. This procedure might be useful in your use case.

Migration assistant would work.

But your VM will have grown a bit due to copying the files you don't need.
Once you delete the unneeded files, you can reclaim that disk space again.
See http://www.vi-toolkit.com/wiki/index.php/Shrink_guest_on_hosted_platform for steps on reclaiming disk space of deleted files.

--
Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva

> Migration assistant would work.

   ok the migration assistant is not seeing any of my physical disks - how do I get it to see a USB mounted clone of another OS X system from which to migrate, or even better, a LAN-shared (AFP) disk of another OS X computer?

Hi,

First you'll need to make sure that USB pass-through works properly on your host.

Does it work with none of your VMs? (I'm assuming here that all of your problems you post about are not the same VM...)

--
Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva

There are 2 VMs. One that got munged, and two new ones that I am creating in case I can't get the first one fixed.  One is on the same machine (which is the one I'd like to do a USB migration from) and one is on another machine (where I'm having the VT issue).

> First you'll need to make sure that USB pass-through works properly on your host.

    I've not used these VMs before - where is that setting? thanks!!

USB pass-through is not really a setting per-se, that is, yes it is dependent on some settings, but the default is that it works.
So unless you explicitly removed the virtual USB controller from the VM or changed its default settings, it should work.

It should work when the VM is running. When you plugin a USB disk VMware Fusion pops up a dialog that lets you connect it directly to the VM you want.

--
Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva

Ok so it wasn't seeing any of my already-attached USB disks. I grabbed another, attached it, and this one it sees. But, even after I've made a TM backup onto it, the Migraiton is failing to acknowledge it has a backup on it