Bye Fusion

This is a script to migrate your machines from greedy VmWare Fusion to slightly-less-greedy Oracle VirtualBox.

It works by converting VMX images to OVF, which can then be manually imported into VB. It takes care of the few known gotchas and low-level hacks to ensure the import process will not fail.

Please fork and improve this script as you see fit, I'm always happy to get pull requests.

Requirements

• Python 3.6. I used this as an excuse to play with pathlib (3.4+) and f-strings (3.6+), but it should be fairly easy to make it run on 3.4+.

• VmWare Fusion.app. You can copy the trial version to /Applications and remove it right after running the script, there is no need to ever launch it.

VirtualBox is not actually required on the machine where you run this script.

Parameters

byefusion.py /path/to/machine.vmwarevm [/path/to/output/folder]

Output folder defaults to /tmp.

Known Issues and Caveats

• About the script

  • the script doesn't report progress very well. I just can't be arsed to find out why the subprocess module is so bitchy. To check if it's running, you can look in Activity Monitor for ovftool, which should be churning CPU and disk resources; you will also get a .tmp file in the output directory, which gets deleted once ovftool terminates.

• About the overall process

  • You might have to remove network cards in the VB import screen, if the image is recent, as newer Fusion versions use hardware that is not available in VB (cards with FAST in the name). The script doesn't do that for you because you will likely want to tweak network config yourself in VB to work properly.

  • the way the whole process works, an image is copied twice: once as .ovf output, and again when VB imports it in its default VM folder. Make sure you have enough space for that on your disk. After VB import succeeds, check that it works and then you can delete the OVF version generated by this script.

  • VB import tries to guess the operating systems, but it often gets confused. If you pick the wrong OS and bitness, import will succeed but the image won't boot. You should always review image settings after import to make sure they are correct.

  • You will have to manually uninstall VmWare Tools inside the image before you can install the VB guest addons. This can be done before or after conversion.

  • In one case, the ovftool from VmWare flatly refused to handle an XP image which had been with me for quite a few years. If that happens, you will have to manually copy away the VMDK disk and recreate the machine from scratch with the disk attached. Before you do that, to improve your chances of success, make sure your disk is monolithic (one file rather than several) and remove all snapshots if possible.

License

Copyright 2017 Giacomo Lacava

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.