As suggested in this post by Christian, I went ahead and downloaded the vmdk2vhd utility to convert virtual hard drives from VMWare’s VMDK format to Microsoft’s VHD format. To test it out, I also downloaded Red Hat Enterprise Linux trial virtual appliance from VMWare’s site, and ran the converter on it. These are my results.
First, running the converter is pretty straightforward. You just launch the utility, and it presents you with a simple UI, where you select the vmdk you want to convert, and the path to the destination VHD.
Once you select the vmdk and the vhd, press the convert button to start the conversion process:
The tool shows you a dialog box when it completes the conversion:
I created a new virtual machine in Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 Beta 2 using this newly converted VHD, and, not knowing what to expect, I started it. The redhat OS started the boot up process normally:
After making some adjustments to the configuration, including the X Server configuration, I finally got the X Windows server to come up. I am currently playing with the OS, and will proceed to install the VM Additions … I will document the process in another post soon.
As you can see, the process for converting a VMWare virtual hard disk to a Virtual Server VHd is very straightforward. This will work, ideally, in a migration scenario, but this also enables a scenario to try out the large amount of Virtual Appliances that you can download from VMWare’s website.