VMWare and Virtualbox on Fedora
I installed Windows7 on a VMWare player on my old Fedora 14 box, now I want to upgrade to Fedora 20 and migrate from VMWare player to VirtualBox.
First I made a backup of my Win directory and my windows7x64.vmx file. Then after doing some reading decided I should try to convert my vmware vmx file to the Open Virtualization Format (.ovf) first.
So I followed the steps and used the following to overcome the errors I saw.
- shutdown the virtual windows properly, first it did about two hours of windows updates because I usally just suspend it. After this I changed windows to ask me if I wanted to install updates.
- I got an error that vmware was out of disk space and I needed to suppend it. So I went into Logical Volume Managment and extended the /win partition my virtual machine was on. Even though is still had free space.
- start and shutdown windows to make sure I have it cleanly shutdown, another hour of updates later, I finally got a clean start and shutdown.
- Use the ovftool to convert to the Open Virtualization Format (.ovf)
- ovftool /home/username/VMware/Windows 7 x64.vmdk.vmx /home/username/Windows 7 x64.ovf
- Error: Failed to open disk: Windows 7 x64.vmdk
- I found out that path to the file was bad with the option:
- ./ovftool --machineOutput --X:logToConsole=true
- Turns out that the symbolic link won't work for the directory, you have to use the actual physical path. So my command became:
- ./ovftool --machineOutput --X:logToConsole=true /win/Windows7x64/Windows\ 7\ x64.vmx /home/username/virutalboxWin7x64.ovf
- Then after 15 minutes of converting, I ran out of disk space
- FileIO error: No space left : /home/username/virutalboxWin7x64-disk1.vmdk.tmp
- It looks like it makes a copy of your whole virtual machine, not just the vmx definitions, so now I find more diskspace and try again.