I was looking into converting the VIMA appliance from OVF to a regular VM. I wanted to run VIMA directly from VMware Workstation. For the windows version of VMware Workstation there’s a conversion tool, and Arne of ICT-Freak wrote a nice howto. (Although it’s in Dutch you will figure it out cause of the large amount of screenshots!)

But I’m using VMware Workstation 6.5 on Ubuntu and it doesn’t contain the conversion features unfortunately. But luckily a beta version of VMware Converter has just been released, 4.0. As of this version VMware Converter is also available for Linux. And you can see where I’m going… You can use VMware Converter for converting .OVF appliances to VMware Workstation:

1. Download VMware Converter
2. Install it by unzipping the tar.gz file and running “./vmware-install.pl”
3. Next, Next, Finish
4. Start VMware Converter
5. File, New, Convert Machine
6. Source Type: Virtual Appliance
   And browse to the .OVF file
7. Destination Type: VMware Workstation
   And pick a destination directory
8. Next, Next Finish!

I think it’s great that more and more tools are available for Linux!