Tuesday, 28 August 2007

Convert Virtual Disks from VHD to VMDK

Everyone can make a mistake and build a virtual machine on a Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2. Soon you will discover that you made the wrong choice and want to convert this virtual machine to the VMware VMDK virtual disk format. Arne Fokkema the Dutch ICT-Freak created a little how to and I translated his document. With the latest version of Winimage (8.10) you can convert the VDH virtual disk format to a VMDK virtual disk file. In this case we are going to convert a Longhorn Beta 3 (Windows Virtual Server 2005 R2) virtual machine to a VMware virtual machine.

Start WinImage. And choose the menu option "Disk".

Now click the Convert Virtual Hard Disk image option and open select the VDH file.

Now select the option "Create Fixed Size Virtual Hard Disk" and click <OK>.

Give your new VMDK file a name and click on <Save>.

The conversion will start.

After this conversion you can start your Longhorn server. The last step is installing the VMware tools and your server is converted.

Happy converting and many thanks to Arne Fokkema.

Posted by

Eric Sloof

in VMware at 20:25 | 6 Comments | No Trackbacks

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Does this work for converting the MS sample VHDs to VMDK for testing purposes so one does not have to install MS Virtual Server etc. etc.??
Or will one run into activation etc. issues because the "hardware" is so different??
Thank you, Tom

#1 Tom on 2007-09-10 19:47 (Reply)

Also you can use the VMware Converter.

#1.1 Roy Hu on 2009-09-08 07:42 (Reply)

Hallo und Help,

Converting in this way is no problem, but teh vmdk files wont start in VMWare Plare or VMWare Workstation?!?!?!?!?

#2 Frank on 2009-07-12 07:55 (Reply)

Here is a great guide to succesfully convert a:

VHD hard disk file to a VMDK
and/or a
VMDK hard disk file to a VHD

http://www.sertec.ca/howtos/VMware-server.html

Cheers,
Pete

#2.1 Pete Ca (Homepage) on 2009-09-05 03:15 (Reply)

Check out this product: http://www.smartdeploy.com/Products/SmartDeploy/VirtualDisk.aspx

SmartVDK will convert from .vhd, .vmdk, .vdi and/or .hdd to any of the aforementioned formats.

It is free for non-commercial use.

#3 arachnode.net (Homepage) on 2009-10-21 20:17 (Reply)

Great Post! No idea that WinImage could do this.. Thanks for the tip!

CARLO.

#4 Carlo Costanzo (Homepage) on 2009-12-10 16:17 (Reply)

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Convert Virtual Disks from VHD to VMDK

NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

Tuesday, 28 August 2007

Convert Virtual Disks from VHD to VMDK

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