Migrating Virtual Box VMs to VMWare (ESXi 6)
I spent a lot of yesterday wasting time trying to bring Virtual Box VMs into VMWare. We had installed a bunch of VMs on local machines (in order to test them) while we waited for our disk array to arrive - and, I guess, our solution of using VirtualBox on OSX was obviously imperfect - but hey - you go with what you have.
I checked this: http://www.baconapplications.com/export-a-virtualbox-machine-to-vmware/ And I checked this: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11160
Based on these I was exporting in OVF 1.0 format, but the issue persists on all formats - though my fix is only tested on OVF 1.0.
And I found that I never actually got the .mf file generated via the OVA. And uploading the OVF never worked.
However, I found that if I changed:
<vssd:VirtualSystemType>virtualbox-2.2</vssd:VirtualSystemType>
to
<vssd:VirtualSystemType>vmx-07</vssd:VirtualSystemType>
the way they said - I got an error with the checksum (and I couldn't just add a .mf file by hand) and if I simply exported the .ovf - I got larger issues.
This was the majority of my day yesterday.
I then found that if I created a OVA file - used Keka to decompress it (it's a 7z file) opened the OVF file there, did the required edit, and then, without recompressing to the OVA, simply fed that to ESXi (File > Deploy OVF Template) and then run it.
I've no idea why the OVA with editted checksum didn't work - nor why simply generating the OVF and editting it didn't work (yes, generating the OVF does place the vmdk into the same folder). But hey - this worked.
