Recently I had the need to import a Ubuntu Virtual Machine that was made in VirtualBox to VMware ESXi. At first I thought the process would be rather difficult but as it turns out, it’s quite easy. In this blog post, I’ll show you how.
What Will Happen
We will not convert the VM per se, instead, we will convert the hard disk file only. What this will mean is that a new VM needs to be created without a hard drive on the ESXi side of things. The command below will produce two files, a file containing the data and a descriptor file. Once complete, we need to copy the aforementioned files to the ESXi host either via WinSCP, scp, or the vSphere client and add it to the VM as an existing disk.
Because I”m using MacOSX, I have to prefix the VBoxManage command with /usr/bin. Also, the filenames input.vdi and output.vmdk should be replaced to suit your needs. Make the appropriate change.
Command
$ /usr/bin/VBoxManage clonehd input.vdi output.vmdk --format VMDK
You should see output like so, after running the command:
0%...10%...20%...30%...40%...50%...60%...70%...80%...90%...100%
That’s it for this post! Thank you for stopping by.