In this blog post I’m going to explain how I successfully migrated a linux guest from VMWare to VirtualBox. For the record I’m running Windows Vista host but I don’t think that should be an issue. For people migrating a Windows guest there is a helpful page at the virtualbox site, however I couldn’t find any clear guide for people migrating a linux guest.
First things first, make a copy of the VMWare vmdk file (the virtual hard disk) to the folder where your other VirtualBox disks (vdi files) are stored. The good news is that the current version of VirtualBox can now use a vmdk virtual disk directly – so no need to deal with conversion.
Next, create a new virtual machine within VirtualBox with similar specifications to what you used in VMWare. When you are prompted to choose a virtual disk, choose the vmdk you previously copied. Now you can try starting the machine and hopefully the linux OS will boot up, although it may encounter some problems during the boot process. I migrated a Kubuntu install and in my situation KDE could not start so I was left with a simple command prompt.
At this point we can remove the VMWare tools. To do this run the “vmware-uninstall-tools.pl” script. If you installed the VMWare tools from an rpm package, you will need to remove them that way (i.e. rpm -e VMwareTools)
Now we are ready to install the VirtualBox guest additions. For some, this may be all you need to do to be up and running on your system under VirtualBox. In my situation, KDE was not starting due to an incorrect X configuration (/etc/X11/xorg.conf). To fix this I ran “dpkg -reconfigure xserver-xorg” to reconfigure the xorg.conf file. During this process it setup the video device driver, monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc. Sometimes it automatically detected the settings, other times I had to select them myself (choosing the obvious choice – i.e. for video driver I selected “vboxvideo” or something similar to that).
After that was finished I restarted the system and KDE started up like normal. The VirtualBox guest additions weren’t enabled, so I ran the installation one more time from KDE. After rebooting one final time, KDE was running fine with the guest additions.
This is everything I have done with my migrated system at this point, and I’m not sure how well a vmdk disk does with VirtualBox (performance wise). If it has performance problems it may be necessary to backup the relevant data and start on a fresh install in VirtualBox. Only time will tell I guess.
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