Tech: Converting VMware virtual machines in Parallels ones

Kimbro Staken, CTO at JumpBox, published on the corporate blog a procedure to convert a VMware virtual machine image in something working with Parallels virtualization products.

The whole process depends on QEMU capability to understand a .vmdk format and translate it in a raw hard disk image. It also has several major issues:

  • once migrated guest OS will not necessarly recognize new hardware exposed by Parallels, it depends on how many drivers are installed
  • if the original VMware hardware included virtual SCSI it will not work at all, since Parallels only support virtual IDE
  • if the original VMware virtual machine image is splitted on several .vmdk files you have to join them together before converting

Please note that this approach would probably be even more painful when the guest OS is Windows.

If you are not doing an amatorial experiment I strongly recommend choosing a more reliable solution, able to adapt a saved hard disk image to any underlying hardware (something usually called V2V migration). Or wait for Parallels Transporter.