Convert from VMWare Player to VMWare Server

Sep 2, 2008 ide-and-web-dev-tools windows

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

At superdev, we have a distribution of a gentoo image made with vmware workstation. This works fine in vmware player - but not the free vmware server - and I wanted to have vmware server running so I could have more than one server running on my windows laptop. Well, there are two small simple edits I had to do - and it was all good.

First of all, I grabbed my favorite free hex editor and evilly smiled. Open XVI32.

Second, edit the file named VirtualMachineName.vmx. Replace the virtualHW.version = "6" with virtualHW.version = "4". SAVE.

Finally, edit the file named VirtualMachineName.vmxd. If you have more than one (like -1, -2, use the one without the suffix. Those are the data files, the vmxd is the config). Once again, replace the virtualHW.version = "6" with virtualHW.version = "4". SAVE.

Other things I ran into…

For whatever reason, my eth0 turned into eth1 once I transferred. So I had to do that modification. (Also, my dhcp on my network stopped responding to the vm, but I changed it to NAT anyway - because I wanted it as a local connection anyways.)