Moving a Linux (Debian) virtual machine from VMWare Fusion (on MacOSX) to VMWare Server (Linux)

I've tripped over this a couple of times, and only figured out what to do about it after googling around a while and mashing together a couple of the results.

After having to re-research the same thing twice I decided to write it down. Hopefully someone else will find it useful.

When I migrate I create a new virtual machine definition on the new machine, and link up the disk image.

When you link up the disk image on VMWare server it probably won't work. So what you will need to do is edit the main "vmdk" file. You should see a line that reads:

Just change the 7 to 4 so it reads like:

Why the newest version of VMWare server doesn't support a disk defined with a virtualHWVersion of "7", and this can overcome by simply changing it to "4" without actually doing anything to the disk is beyond me :)

Once this is done you should be able to use the disk image.

The virtual machine should be able to boot, but networking probably won't work.

When you created a new virtual machine definition a new virtual MAC address will have been created for the VM's NIC. Debian will have responded to this new MAC by assigning it a new ethernet device (just in case the old one comes back).

For example if you had set up networking on eth0 for the VM on your mac you will find there is a new unconfigured eth1 device and eth0 is present but inactive.

So how do you fix this? Edit the following file: /etc/udev/rules.d/z25_persistent-net.rules

There should be two entries at the end of the file that look something like this:

Comment out the first one, and change the name of the second to "eth0". It'll look something like this:

Restart your virtual machine and the networking configuration you had working in Fusion will be working on Server.

Alternatively you could set the MAC address of the VM on VMWare Server to be the same the MAC it was using in VMWare Fusion, but you would run into trouble if you ever ran both the original and copy on the same network at the same time. So letting it keep the new MAC address is probably safer.