• Go to susestudio.com and open an account
• Click “Create New Appliance”
• Select “GNOME Desktop” and click “Create Appliance”
  
• Change the name of the appliance to something that makes a bit more sense…
• I would personally add “File Roller” and “GCC” so that you can actually open archives from the GUI and make modules, which is need to install VMware tools.
  
• Go to the  “Configuration Tab” and click on “Appliance”
• Increase the memory to 1024MB for a better running appliance
• Download VMware Converter Standalone for Linux and add it as a file in the “Overlay Files” tab
  
• When uploading is finished select a folder where the tar.gz file should be extracted, I picked “/vmwconverter”
• Click on the “Build” Tab and wait for it to complete
  

It’s as easy as that! With SUSE you have the option to Test Drive it and make changes to the image while test driving it. I would recommend to just download it and install VMware Converter while running the VM with VMware player. Or you could import it with vCenter and run it on an ESX host. This way you can also install VMware tools immediately.

• Open the VMX file with VMware Player
• Install VMware Tools:
  Right click VM “install VMware tools”
• Open a terminal session within the VM and type:

  cd /media/VMware Tools
  tar -C /tmp -xvf <VMware Tools File>
  /tmp/vmware-tools-distrib/vmware-install.pl

  Agree with all the defaults…

• Now to install VMware Converter open a terminal session and do the following:

  cd /vmwconverter/vmware-converter-distrib

  ./vmware-install.pl

  Use all the defaults!

• You can add an icon to the desktop by right clicking the desktop and selecting “Create Launcher”
• Select “/usr/bin/vmware-converter-client”
• And add the correct icon! (/usr/share/icons/vmware-converter.png)

Now your appliance is good to go and can be used everywhere in your virtual infrastructure. I would recommend making it a template or vApp and deploy it multiple times when doing many parallel migrations!

So what’s new?

• Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu) as source
• Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
• Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes to physical machine during the P2V conversion process
• Support for converting new third-party image formats including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
• Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, automatic start-up of the destination virtual machine as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
• Target disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes are laid out in the new destination virtual machine
• Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type

I think especially the hot cloning improvement, which copies incremental changes, and the workflow automation are really cool features. These are the kind of enhancements that will make your life a lot easier during migration projects.

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!

How do I do this:

1. click on scheduled tasks
2. click new and pick “import a machine”
3. select “physical” and enter the servers name/ip and username and password
4. select the disks you want to import
5. type a name for the VM
6. select the destination host
7. select a datastore
8. select a network
9. and schedule the task!

Go to the following registry key:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\UI]

And set the following key to “Enabled”

“C:\\Program Files\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\Virtual Infrastructure Client\\Plugins\\Converter Enterprise\\plugin.dll”