Importing Machines from Other Environments
VMware offers a stand-alone free product called vCenter Converter to help you take OS installations on physical hardware and migrate them—using a process called a physical-to-virtual (P2V) migration—into a virtualized environment running vSphere. Not only does vCenter Converter provide P2V functionality, but it also provides virtual-to-virtual (V2V) functionality. The V2V functionality allows VMs created on other virtualization platforms to be imported into VMware vSphere. You can also use VMware Converter's V2V functionality to export VMs out of VMware vSphere to other virtualization platforms. This V2V functionality is particularly helpful in moving VMs between VMware's enterprise-class virtualization platform, VMware vSphere, and VMware's hosted virtualization platforms, such as VMware Workstation for Windows or Linux or VMware Fusion for Mac OS X. Although VMware created all these products, slight differences...