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I have a computer with a Unix OS installed on it. I want to convert this computer to a virtual machine so that I can run it on another computer with VMware workstation.

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Plz send codez!!!!11!!one – mh. Oct 15 '09 at 20:12
Hardly. I think this is a real question. Do you want them to pad it with three paragraphs of irrelevant back story? – Mark Henderson♦ Oct 15 '09 at 20:16
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Alex: Please be more descriptive. It looks like you are asking how to convert an existing install to a vmware image, but we have no idea what kind of existing install. Bare metal? Xen? Another VM system? – Scott Markwell Oct 15 '09 at 20:22
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I think it would be more beneficial to visit the VMWare site and obtain the appropriate tools and information from them. After all, they seem to know something about this stuff. – John Gardeniers Oct 15 '09 at 20:51
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SO/F/U is not the place to be answering with "Google It" links. The idea is that when people google it brings them here. – Mark Henderson♦ Oct 15 '09 at 21:22
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

The product you need is called VMWare Converter. You will be after the Standalone version. The documentation for it can be found here.

Basically, the VMWare Converter will take the existing physical Unix machine and convert it into a VMWare format. This VMWare image can then be loaded into whichever VMWare host you choose.

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can I install it on unix? does it support unix? – Alex Oct 15 '09 at 21:29
this sounds like the way to go for me. – djangofan Oct 15 '09 at 21:30
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Hi Alex, please read the documentation. "Unix" isn't a good enough description. Is it FreeBSD? AIX? AT&T System V? – Mark Henderson♦ Oct 15 '09 at 21:50
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up vote 2 down vote

Although I prefer the VMWare Converter answer, you could probably also do it using Clonezilla. Just be careful to create a VMWare image that has a virtual hard drive that is the same size or bigger than the original. Also, keep in mind that when the virtual machine starts up its going to detect totally different hardware and so you might have an issue with X-windows, network connectivity, etc. that you will need to work around.

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