virtualbox 2 vmware disk

Question

I have a virtualbox disk I'd like to convert to a vmware disk. The disk is dynamic which makes it a lot more trickier. If I follow the instructions at http://xpapad.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/migrating-from-virtualbox-to-vmware-in-linux, the vdi-to-raw conversion will result in a 2 TB file. I don't even have that much disk space! The first step therefore seems to be a dynamic to static conversion of the virtualbox disk, right? How do I do that or is there perhaps a better way to convert to vmware? Help!

Answer 1

While it's tempting to try some fancy disk conversion scheme, the best and simplest way is probably just to run VMware vCenter P2V Virtual Machine Converter.

Answer 2

Download latest QEMU for your OS to use qemu-img.

Try compressed qcow2 format or use defragment + sdelete approach to shrink the disk image size first.

qemu-img supported formats:

      qcow2 bochs null-aio qcow null-co host_
      file parallels vdi blkdebug dmg vpc raw
      qed vvfat vmdk sheepdog blkverify nbd cloop

Answer 3

Unfortunately, VMWare does have problems importing Virtual appliances created in Virtualbox, otherwise the process would be quite easy.

As an alternative to the method described in your post, you may wish to take a look at this http://www.barbaropoli.com/2009/07/how-to-convert-virtual-disk-from.html It's a similar process but does not require an intermediate massive RAW disk image.

Answer 4

Personally, I'm not clever enough to use the fancy virtual tools and stuff and tend to just consider what I am doing in terms of real machines.

As such you need to copy everything from one hard disk to another.

I would create an empty VMWare vmdk disk and add that as a second hard disk to the virtual machine in Virtualbox, then use whatever tool to copy the disk from within the Virtualbox virtual machine.

Then release the vmdk disk from the Virtualbox virtual machine and attach it to a new VMWare machine.