For this VM, unfortunately, that resulted in a black screen with an “Operating system not found” error. Note that the end of this section details further setup steps I took, to finish configuring the Win7 VM in VMware Player.Īnyway, in my first go, I had the P2V VM in VirtualBox, and I used the OVA approach to convert it to VMware, as indicated in the foregoing bullet points. As discussed at greater length in the following sections of this post, I tried other methods, to convert that Win7 VM from VDI to VMDK, before coming back to this OVA approach. For that Win7 VM, the OVA process worked. This one was created from scratch, in VirtualBox, from a Windows 7 (not 10) installation DVD. But later, when I returned to this post, I tried the OVA approach with a different VM. The next paragraph continues with further details on that. When I was initially writing this post, with the P2V VM mentioned above, this OVA approach did not work. Regardless of whether I planned to use the VM mostly offline, at the start I wanted its network connection turned on, so that it could download drivers as needed during its initial self-configuration, when its Windows installation booted up.Īt this point, results diverged.
I edited its settings (e.g., memory, processors) as desired. The import process ended with a VMware screen listing my new VM in “Powered Off” status. Unlike VirtualBox, VMware evidently did not create duplicative subfolders: I was specifying exactly the folders where it would put its files. For some reason, VMware refused to write the new VM to a root directory (i.e., drive F) I had to tell it to use a subfolder (e.g., F:\Sub) before it would proceed. In VMware Player, Hoffman ( 2017) said the next step was to choose Open a Virtual Machine > browse to the OVA file > Import > Retry if necessary.
During installation, based on advice from various sources, I opted to install the Enhanced Keyboard Driver. I shut down VirtualBox and installed VMware Player 15. In VBM, I went into menu > File > Export Appliance > select the VM to export > Next > specify destination folder and file name, but otherwise accept default values > Next > Export. At this point, the VM was 45GB uncompressed and 15GB compressed. I didn’t think the conversion would cause any harm to the source VM I was more interested in tying it all up in a relatively compact package, in case I decided not to come back to VirtualBox. I also made a compressed (.rar) backup of all files in this VM’s folder. Before attempting the conversion, I powered down the VM. For that, How-To Geek (Hoffman, 2017) advised me to proceed as follows: To achieve the conversion to VMware format, it appeared that the favored method might be to use VirtualBox Manager (VBM). Win-R means hold the Windows key, near the lower left corner of most PC keyboards, and hit the R key. Note: commands here tend to be displayed in italics when not set off on a separate line.
A more concise summary of these methods appears in a later post. This post describes how I did that, expanding upon methods discussed in another prior post. Instead of starting over to recreate, from scratch, a VMware version of that VirtualBox VM, I wanted to convert the VirtualBox VM to VMware. That VM was actually a physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversion - that is, a virtual version of a Windows 10 installation on a physical host computer (see post). As described in an earlier post, I had created and configured a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM).