One of the biggest selling point of VMware products is portability of virtual machines among all platforms.
To work flawless this process relies on compatibility between the virtualization platform and the virtual hardware generation featured by every virtual machine.
In some cases a possible mismatch denies powering on your VM.
To prevent such scenarios VMware is developing the second generation of its Virtual Machine Importer, already able to do a much wanted operation: import Microsoft virtual machines and Symantec Ghost (now included in the Backup Exec System Recovery family) computer images.
In this new version the tool is able to manipulate every kind of virtual machine and make it compatible with all most recent VMware products, including Server 1.0 and ESX Server 3.0.
The just published Release Candidate (build 30557) has still some serious compatibility issues, mostly with Linux and 64-bit operating systems in general.
So better read the release notes before downloading it.