I'm Not Using VMWare Anymore...

It’s true. I’m not using VMWare anymore.

It was a bitter-sweet journey, but alas all things come to an end.

I originally switched to VMWare from VirtualBox because I couldn’t get VirtualBox to open any Windows machines. That was an absolute deal-breaker. I needed to find a solution to running a Windows VM, and because I have a linux host I wasn’t going to use Hyper-V so I figured I’d give VMWare a shot.

VMWare gave me a ton of trouble. It doesn’t come with the necessary packages to fully install (at least to install on Pop!_os) and a few other issues. But more importantly, it is slow as hell and the VMs are very unresponsivle. I’d have to click on things repeatedly for them to register.

Since I recently had to upgrade my storage and reinstalled my OS, it wiped all the changes I made to VirtualBox. I decided to try one last time to see if I could get a Windows box to open, and luckily enough it does!

This tells me that something I did when trying to change some of the networking configs borked my Windows last time.

I didn’t want to recreate my Flare VM since that takes hours, so I started the process of importing it into VirtualBox. Initially, this failed. New versions of VMWare create a NVMe drive, but VirtualBox only takes SATA. The error code had Host resource of type "Other Storage Device (20)" is supported with SATA AHCI controllers only, line 48 (subtype:vmware.nvme.controller). as the explanation.

In order to fix this, I did the following steps:

1. For the VMWware VM you’re wanting to transfer, click “Edit virtual machine settings.”
2. Under “Hardware,” click “Add…” > Hard Disk > SATA.
3. Under “Which disk do you want to use?” click “Use an existing virtual disk.”
4. For the existing disk file, use the browser to find the <vm name>.vmdk file without any of the numerical extensions (e.g. -000001.vmdk). Save the edit.
5. You should now have a copy of the original hard disk, one as NVMe and one as SATA.
6. Go back into the edit for the VM and remove the NVMe drive. Save, and you should not only have the single SATA disk drive.
7. With the VM still selected, go to VM > Manage > Change Hardware Compatibility.
8. Change the Hardware compatibility to being Workstation 12.x, which removes the ability for there to be NVMe drives.
9. With the compatibility wizard complete, you can then go to File > Export to OVF.

This new .ovf file can now be imported into VirtualBox.

I did this with my Windows 11 Flare VM and it imported and booted right up! With being able to import these machines and actually get the Windows machines booted, I’ll start migrating back over to VirtualBox. The real test will be whether the performance is improved over the VMWare source for these machines. I had no issues with performance before so I have high hopes.