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Work comfortably with your virtual machines learning to convert VMware into VitualBox and vice versa.
One of the most powerful and useful tools that we have within our roles as administrators or support personnel are virtual machines since they give us the possibility of creating one or more machines with different Operating Systems such as Mac , Linux or Windows in a single equipment without having to buy more hardware resources which translates into cost and infrastructure reduction.
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Advantages of a virtual machine
- Having one or more virtual machines offers us the following advantages :Create test environments
- Analyze the behavior of new applications or software
- Use these virtual machines as an extension of our physical machine
- Avoid purchasing additional licenses
Two of the most used applications worldwide to create virtual environments are VMware and VirtualBox but we know that each one has its benefits and cons.
What is VMware?
This great utility for creating virtual machines can be downloaded from the following link:
With VMware for desktops we have the following benefits:
- Supports virtualization of i386 and x64 processors
- Safe and individually separated environments
- Supports the latest editions of Microsoft, Linux and Mac
- High performance for 3D graphics
- Supports IPv4 and IPv6 connections
- Virtual machines can be shared
What is VirtualBox?
It is another of the most used applications and we can download it from the following link:
The main features of VirtualBox are:
- Supports a large number of Operating Systems such as: Mac, Windows, Linux
- Free software
- It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures
- Easy to use
Next we will see how to convert our virtual machines between both applications.
Convert a VirtualBox virtual machine to VMware
The migration process between VirtualBox and VMware is very simple.
- To do this, we access VirtualBox and go to the File menu and select the Export virtualized service option.
- Later we will see that the following window is displayed where we must select the machine that we are going to import.
- In our case we select Debian 8, press Next and we must establish the path where we will save the virtual machine and something very important is that it must be in the OVF format. Click OK once we have defined where the virtual machine is to be saved.
- In the next window we can see the virtual machine configurations to be exported.
- Once the values have been defined, we press the Export button and we will see that the export process from VirtualBox to VMware begins.
- Once this process has been completed, we go to VMware and select the Open option from the File menu.
- There we must go to the path where we have saved the virtual machine that we have exported, in this case Debian 8.
- Once the virtual machine is located, we press the Open button and we will see that the following window is displayed.
- We press the Import button to start the import process of the virtual machine.
- Usually it shows you an error, but it is not a big deal, just click on the Retry button for the process to start again correctly.
- Once the process is finished we can see our virtual machine imported correctly in VMware.
- There we click on the Power on this virtual machine line to start the virtual machine.
In this simple way we have exported a virtual machine from VirtualBox to VMware.
How to convert a VMware virtual machine to VirtualBox using OVFTOOL?
There are basically two steps to accomplish this task.
- To use this method, just go to the following path and there right click on ovftool.exe and select the option Open command window here.
C : \ Program Files \ VMware \ VMware Workstation \ OVFTool
- Once the command prompt opens, we must enter the following syntax. We press Enter and the ovf file compatible with VirtualBox will be created.
ovftool “c: \ Path machine to export.vmx” “c: \ Path of destination.ovf”
How to convert a VMware virtual machine to VirtualBox using VMware?
A simpler method is to use the VMWare application directly, for this we will carry out the following process.
- We select the machine to export and go to the file menu and select the option Export to OVF. In this case we will export Windows 10 to be run in VirtualBox.
- When pressing this option we will see the following window where we must define the path and name of the machine to export.
- We save the machine and the export process will begin.
- Once the process has finished, we go to VirtualBox and from the File menu we select the Import virtualized service option.
- In the displayed window we must go to the path where we have saved the VMware exported machine.
- We press Next and we will see the configuration to be imported.
- Finally we click Import to start the process.
- We can see that the virtual machine has been imported correctly. Just press the Start button to boot the Windows 10 virtual machine.
We have seen how we can alternate our virtual machines between the two most important utilities, VMware and VirtualBox and thus get the most out of this powerful tool. Here you have seen how you can perform both combinations and switch between the two virtual machines.
