This seems to be a fairly popular topic out there, so I thought I’d share my little how-to. It’s not really different to other guides you may read, but given Oracle’s inevitable imminent alienation of the VirtualBox community, the inevitable jacking up of the support costs, the inevitable stifling of development resources and feature enhancements followed by the inevitable fork (perhaps with some patent litigation thrown in for good measure), what better time to try it out? :)

 

My test source physical machine is an old Pentium 4 box running Windows XP Home SP3. It contains a single 75GB HDD, itself holding a single partition occupying the whole disc. Nothing fancy. The objective is to convert the machine into a VMware VMDK image file, then import that into VirtualBox (in this case, version 3.1.4 running on an OpenIndiana oi_147 host). According to the VirtualBox user manual, the VMDK format is fully supported by VirtualBox. If you’re trying this out yourself, note that in this guide I’m assuming prior basic familiarity with creating VMs in VirtualBox.

Our first step is to download and install the free VMware vCenter Converter Standalone application on the physical source PC. You can grab it from the following location – but note you will need to create an online account and register to receive a download link (yuck):

http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/

After downloading, simply step through the installation wizard defaults – there are no surprises nor quirks to note.

 

Once installed, let’s run the vCenter Converter application, and convert our machine to a virtual clone:

Yes, we want to use the machine that is powered on and running the vCenter application itself:

For now I am saving the clone to the HDD of the machine I am cloning from – we are going to resize the clone’s HDD size, so we won’t have any space issues (obviously use a larger physical disc, pop another disc in the machine, or save to large external storage otherwise). Note that we using VMware Workstation 7.0.x file format, and the name of our clone is “cybernoid-virtual”:

In the Options screen that follows, click on the “Data to copy” entry on the left hand side pane, and on the right hand side click on “Advanced…”, where we can get at the disc resize settings:

We have resized the destination (clone) HDD to be 20GBs (with the “type” set to “not pre-allocated”). Also, for the other options available in this screen, we have specified a single CPU, 500MB of RAM, and NAT networking. Make a note of these latter options and their settings, as we’ll need to manually enter them into VirtualBox when recreating the virtual machine there:

That’s all I configured here, leaving everything else at the defaults, and letting the application clone the physical machine (which took about an hour).

 

At the end of the process, vCenter Converter had created a folder containing the critical cybernoid-virtual.vmdk file. I copied this file over to my OpenIndiana machine, fired up VirtualBox 3.1.8, and imported it using the VirtualBox Virtual Media Manager.

I then used the VirtualBox New Virtual Machine Wizard to create a Windows XP virtual machine, pointing to the .vmdk file to use for its virtual hard disc. I was careful to set it to use 500MB of memory, and only a single CPU.

 

Finally firing it up, I was met with a VirtualBox splash screen, followed by a blank, black screen with no other activity. Although the VM reported a status of “Running” it was clearly failing to boot at all. Referring to the VirtualBox Windows migration how-to here…

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows

…I came across the following section:

“…If you perform a Windows installation with default settings in VirtualBox, Halacpi.dll will be chosen as VirtualBox enables ACPI by default but disables the IO APIC by default. A standard installation on a modern physical PC or VMware will usually result in Halaacpi.dll being chosen as most systems nowadays have an IO APIC and VMware chose to virtualize it by default (VirtualBox disables the IO APIC because it is more expensive to virtualize than a standard PIC). So as a first step, you either have to enable IO APIC support in VirtualBox or replace the HAL. Replacing the HAL can be done by booting the VM from the Windows CD and performing a repair installation…”

Rather than shag around with a repair installation, I simply enabled IO APIC in the VirtualBox settings for the machine, and bingo:

My host machine is an Intel Q8200 which doesn’t have Intel VT-x (thanks so much, Intel…), but even so, performance is pretty good.

 

I also tried the above procedure to create a virtual clone of a laptop running Windows 7 64 bit. It also worked fine, but only after using an IDE storage controller to attach the VMDK to in the VirtualBox settings for the VM – using SATA, the VM would refuse to boot without a BSOD: