Parallels to VMWare Fusion

The Background

One bucket.  That's what I want.  One bucket for all my action items.  Unfortunately, when you regularly work work from 5 different computers that may or may not be conneted to the same network, this becomes a bit difficult.  Especially when those systems aren't connected to the domain your co-workers are connected to.

Fortunately, I have a Virtual Machie running in Parallels on my notebook which is conneted to that domain.  I'm a huge VMWare fan, but I'm every bit the Parallel's fan is well.  Coherence rocks.  However,  I do most of my strategic work from my home office which has a Mac mini and a Dell XPS system running Vista.  So, the notebook is not the right location for that VM, it should be on one of those home systems.

All of that rambling to say, I've decided to move the VM that lives on the domain where my tasks ought to be organized from Parallels on my notebook to VMWare Fusion running on my Mac Mini at home.  My hope was that VMware Fusion would natively recognize the Parallels file.  Unfortunately, that's just not the case.  Below is the brief synopsis of what needed to happen to get it working.

The Technical Details

I first installed the VMware Converter (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) onto my Virtual Machine.  VMWare Converter has to be run as an administrator which my default account is not.  A simple Run As command took care of this.  Once I had VMware Converter running I simply clicked the "Import Virtual Machine" button, selected "Standalone virtual machine ..." as the Source, "This Local Machine" at the Source Login screen and then finished out the Wizard without much more thought. 

Once the Converter finished its job and it gave me a folder with all the needed Vmdk files, I enabled file sharing on the Mac Mini and moved the files from my notebook to the Mini.  I then opened Fusion (which I downloaded from http://www.vmware.com/products/beta/fusion/) and selected "File -> New".  This brought up a mostly self-explanatory Wizard.  The only slightly confusing part is that the Wizard asks for a Destination Location on the screen where you name your system.  I soon found this does not matter because on the next screen (Virtual Hard Disk) gave me an "Advanced Disk Options" which allowed me to select "Use an Existing Virtual Disk" which then allowed me to select the location of the VMDK files I just moved to the system.

Once this was complete, I upgraged the hardware of the VM (under the Virtual Machine folder) and was mostly good to go.  Microsoft wanted me to reactivate everything due to the change in hardware (both Windows and Office).  That was definitely annoying and added one more notch to the "man I wish I could find a more viable alternative to Microsoft Windows for my client that isn't so dependent on Microsoft" meter.  That meter is certainly not over the edget yet, but it's definitely climbing.

Now that Microsoft is activated, it seems that all is well with the newly relocated VM.  We'll have to see how Fusion works out for me.  I think I'm going to miss Coherence, but I'm too cheap to buy a parallels license and very interested to see Fusion in action.  I'll run with it for a bit and let you know how it goes.  Already I like the "Take Snapshot" feature, I look forward to checking out 3D graphics (although I doubt I'll care, I'm such a boring computer user), and I'm glad they let me hid the toolbar.

Well, if you've read to the end leave a comment.  I want to know who both of you are :)  Of course I'm not sure if I'll find your diligence in reading such a boring post impressive or concerning ...

Comments

[andy]

I needed to convert a parallels image, so thanks for the info. I own a license for both but I always find myself running the free betas for parallels.

[Yuhong Bao]

"That was definitely annoying and added one more notch to the "man I wish I could find a more viable alternative to Microsoft Windows for my client that isn't so dependent on Microsoft" meter."
Unfortunately, in this case as long as you run Windows, even virtualized, you will have to live with things like this.

[Stuart]

Dear Sir:

Indeed we are left with the fact that 20 some odd states, and our Federal Government settled with Microsoft on their anti-trust action, and did not force the full publication of Microsoft's API.

Had this been the case, none of us would be using VMware or Parallels right now. We'd be running Windows applications natively under Linux or MacOS, and Microsoft would be reeling from huge losses on VIsta.

The Digital Delinquent