How to convert your physical machine into a virtual machine using VMware Converter

Posted on June 7th, 2009 at 16:50, in How To, VMware, Virtualization.

How many times did you want to build yourself a virtual machine that would resemble your old physical machine, with the other OS on? How many times have you abandoned the thought because you didn’t have the time to reinstall all the programs that were up and running on the physical one? Well, your worries are almost over after you finish reading this post.

The guys at VMware have a superb product called VMware Converter. I recently used it to transform my old Windows machine at work into a virtual one so I wouldn’t be needed to boot into another OS. The process of converting your machine is pretty straightforward so I will only post a guideline on how you should use the product.

Here we go:

  1. Download VMware Converter from here (Linux or Windows version).
  2. Install it.
  3. Import your machine for conversion.
  4. Make the necessary adjustments for your new virtual machine. I suggest that you create your virtual disks as large as your files extend, otherwise the converter will create virtual disks with a capacity identical to your physical ones (and I am sure that you won’t be thrilled to have a 250GiB file for the virtual HDD if your files merely occupy 20GiB). The tool has support for sysprep which could be used to configure the machine at its first boot (only for Windows).
  5. Select the tool to which you would like to deploy your new virtual machine (VMware Player, VMware Server, VMware Workstation, etc.).
  6. Enjoy!

All this shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes for a 20GB virtual disk and this method of converting your physical machine will save you time and energy as you won’t have to install all the programs once again in you virtual machine.

P.S. If you have configured your VM to be deployed on one product and than you want to deploy it on another, you only have to import your .vmx file and choose the new destination.

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