In this post I will show you how to convert a Linux disk or raw image file to a VMDK file so you can create a VMWare Workstation virtual machine from it. The basic steps are creating a raw image file of the physical disk using dd and converting the raw image file to a VMware disk/vmdk file. I was using Windows to do this but I’ll mention some Linux instructions as well.
Why this scenario
For on-line Linux machines you can use vCenter Converter to create a virtual machine the catch is it only supports ESXi. In my case I had to create a virtual machine from a disk /off-line machine for VMware Workstation on a Windows machine. At the time I couldn’t find a free native Windows tool that would create a raw image of the Linux disk. Potentially you could use disk imaging software to clone the disk in a virtual machine but the free Windows ones I tried didn’t have the necessary drivers included in their boot environments for VMWare disk controllers.
Creating the raw image file
To run dd on Windows requires Cygwin, there are no additional settings or packages required. I just accepted all the defaults during installation. It is important to run Cygwin as administrator in Windows or you will get permission denied errors in Linux when you run dd. Once inside Cygwin run the following to identify your attached disks:
cd /dev
ls -la
The device name of your disks will depend on the type and number of attached devices, in my case it was /dev/sdc (the third disk). You can read about Linux device naming here. I wanted to write the image file to my Windows D: drive which will be mounted as /cygdrive/d. Once you identified the source and destination you can run dd to create the image file.
dd if=/dev/sdc of=/cygdrive/d/diskimage.img
Note: I looked into using Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Cygwin but from what I Googled WSL doesn’t have the ability to address block devices so dd won’t work.
Converting the raw image file to VMDK
I used Starwind V2V Converter to convert the raw img file to a VMDK file, it is free but you have to supply some personal details to get the download link. The app is easy enough to use so I won’t show all the steps here, just choose Local file for the source and Local file VMDK as the destination. Starwind V2V has the option to convert a physical disk to a VMDK file but it didn’t show my Linux disks as a source, only the Windows ones.
On Linux you can use Qemu to convert img files to VMDK and other virtual disk formats. You can also use Qemu to convert a physical disk directly to VMDK file without creating the raw image file first.
I looked into using Qemu in Cygwin instead of Starwind V2V Converter but at the time Qemu packages weren’t available for Cygwin but I guess you could compile it from source and install the dependencies if you really want to go that way.
Creating the VM
Once you have the VMDK file you can create a new Linux virtual machine in VMWare Workstation. Be sure to match the Linux distribution of your source machine. I was converting an Ubuntu machine and it booted successfully without any additional work.
The final step is to install open-vm-tools for desktop or server.
#Desktop
sudo apt install open-vm-tools-desktop
#Server
sudo apt install open-vm-tools
