Migrating from VMware

jspencer · Post by **jspencer** » 13. Jan 2009, 05:22

Hi Everyone

Sorry about the long story, but I want to make it clear what my situation is.

I've been using VirtualBox for a few months now, and finally decided to take the plunge and move 4 VMware Server images over.

The VMs consist of 3 Windows XP images, and a Server 2003 image. VMware Server was running on a 2 year old version of Gentoo. The new host is Ubuntu 8.10 and Virtualbox 2.1.

I've loaded the VMware vmdk files into the Virtual Media Manager and created new VM's for each of the old images.

The Server 2003 loads perfectly (using the e1000 driver). It wanted to be re-activated, and then it was fine.

The Windows XP images also loaded with the e1000 driver. They seemed ok, but I quickly noticed that all the data on them was out of date.

I've come to the following conclusion, VirtualBox is loading the OLDEST snapshot from the vmdk files. the Server 2003 VM is unaffected as it has no snapshots.

I guess I'd like to know if anyone has run into a similar situation. The VMware snapshots I have were just taken as backups and I really don't need the old snapshots, I just want the most recent one!

Any help would be great.

thanks

John

Post by **sej7278** » 13. Jan 2009, 08:20

can't you remove the snapshots before converting?

jspencer · Post by **jspencer** » 13. Jan 2009, 08:34

Using VMware server?

That was the next thing I was going to try, but I didn't have convenient access to VMware today.

I haven't had as much experience with VMware and I'm not sure exactly what it will and won't let me do with the images.

John

Post by **sej7278** » 13. Jan 2009, 11:06

i don't know, i never used snapshots when i used vmware server, but i expect you can remove the previous snapshots like you can with virtualbox, i think you can just delete the files actually (not sure).

then import into virtualbox.

how did that go btw, from all accounts on here, especially with windows guests, it doesn't actually work! did you have non-expanding disks and no vmware-tools installed?

jspencer · Post by **jspencer** » 15. Jan 2009, 04:55

Well, I've re-installed VMware Server and told it to remove the snapshots from the images. It doesn't appear to actually delete anything and VirtualBox still loads the oldest snapshot.

I did find that I could try to load one of the other .vmdk files, but then I run into the dreaded "No bootable medium found!" problem and checking the partition with an ubuntu boot disk indicates that it is empty.

The Windows Server 2003 image still loads perfectly. All our images are non-expanding, but I'm not sure about vmware-tools.

My current solution to this involves booting both vmware and VirtualBox and using an Ubuntu boot disk and PartImage to copy the image across the virtual networks. Bit hacky, but at least it should work.