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TOPIC: OPEN VIRTUALIZATION FORMAT

Migrating a virtual machine from VirtualBox to VMware Player on Linux

1st February 2015

The progress of Windows 10 is something that I have been watching. Early signs have been promising, and the most recent live event certainly contained its share of excitement. The subsequent build that was released was another step in the journey, though the new Start Menu appears more of a work in progress than it did in previous builds. Keeping up with these advances sometimes steps ahead of VirtualBox support for them, and I discovered that again in the last few days. VMware Player seems unaffected, so I thought that I'd try a migration of the VirtualBox VM with Windows 10 onto there. In the past, I did something similar with a 32-bit instance of Windows 7 that subsequently got upgraded all the way up to 8.1, but that may not have been as slick as the latest effort, so I thought that I would share it here.

The first step was to export the virtual machine as an OVF appliance, and I used File > Export Appliance... only to make a foolish choice regarding the version of OVF. The one that I picked was 2.0 only to subsequently discover that 1.0 was the better option. The equivalent command line would look like the following (there are two dashes before the ovf10 option below):

VboxManage export [name of VM] -o [name of file].ova --ovf10

VMware has a tool for extracting virtual machines from OVF files that will generate a set of files that will work with Player and other similar products of theirs. It goes under the unsurprising name of OVF Tool and usefully works from a command line session. When I first tried it with an OVF 2.0 files, I got the following error, and it stopped doing anything as a result:

Line 2: Incorrect namespace http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/envelope/2 found.

The only solution was to create a version 1.0 file and use a command like the following:

ovftool --lax [name of file].ova [directory location of VM files]/[name of file].vmx

The --lax option is needed to ensure successful execution, even with an OVF 1.0 file as the input. Once I had done this on my Ubuntu GNOME system, the virtual machine could be opened up on VMware Player and I could use the latest build of Windows 10 at full screen, something that was not possible with VirtualBox. This may be how I survey the various builds of the operating that appear before its final edition is launched later this year.

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