Migrate VMWare box to VirtualBox

VMWare, VirtualBox | July 17, 2014

VMware Player is only free for personal non-commercial use. It's not so hard to migrate your VMWare box to VirtualBox, but it you used a SCSI disk in VMWare, you will see the error below when trying to run converted box in VirtualBox:

Could not find a storage controller named 'SCSI Controller'."

The instructions below will guide you through the converting process.

VMWare

• Boot the VM
• Uninstall vmware tools
• Shutdown
• Edit VM settings -> remove the HD
• Edit the_machine.vmdk
• change ddb.adapterType from "buslogic" or "lsilogic" to "ide"
• Edit VM settings -> add an HD, type IDE from existing file the_machine.vmdk
• Boot the VM
• Shutdown

Now you can convert the box from VMWare to Open Virtualization Format.

$ ovftool -o the_machine.vmx the_machine.ovf Opening VMX source: the_machine.vmx Opening OVF target: the_machine.ovf Writing OVF package: the_machine.ovf Transfer Completed Completed successfully

VirtualBox

The last step is to import the OFV in VirtualBox and install guest additions.

• File -> import appliance -> the_machine.ovf
• VM settings -> storage -> add attachment -> CD drive
• Boot the VM
• install guest additions from CD

And you're ready to uninstall VMWare play. !

$ sudo vmware-installer -u vmware-player

Edit: resize disk

Note that you can't resize a VMDK disk. You will have to convert it to VDI first and then resize it (size in MB). (I only tried expand) Eg:

VBoxManage clonehd the_machine.vmdk the_machine.vdi --format VDI --variant Standard

VBoxManage modifyhd the_machine.vdi --resize 50000

Next you can use your operating system to resize the partition. Eg: with Gparted on Linux systems or "administrative tools" -> "disk management" in Windows.