Convert vmware workstation 6.5 to esxi free

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Dec 11,  · Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) is one of the most affordable tools for this purpose. It includes GUI tools and command line tools for PowerShell. With the MVMC GUI, you can convert entire VMs running on ESXi hosts. PowerShell cmdlets allow you to convert individual VMware virtual disks of ESXi format and Workstation format. VMware Workstation Pro runs on most standard xbased hardware with bit Intel and AMD processors and on bit Windows or Linux host operating systems. Please review the CPU requirements before purchase, as some older CPU’s are no longer compatible. VMware recommends GB of available disk space for the application. May 18,  · There must be enough free storage space for the ESXi upgrade. If an ESXi host is managed by vCenter Server, the vCenter version must be the same as the target version of ESXi after the upgrade or higher. VMware vCenter can manage ESXi , ESXi and ESXi , but vCenter cannot manage ESXi hosts.
 
 

How to Convert VMware Workstation Virtual Machine to ESXi

November 28, Since Apple’s new macOS Big Sur dropped a little over 2 weeks ago , some of you may want to tinker around with the new OS in your homelab. Below I’ll list out the steps I used to get this up and running in my lab environment. This guide is primarily written for an Intel based machine running a Type 1 bare metal hypervisor. For AMD machines. Please refer to the comments at the end of this guide for any workarounds. We’ll need these items above to complete this entire process. Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through all the steps in obtaining these items.

Ok first off we’ll need the macOS 11 Big Sur iso. Throughout the vast interwebs, you can search and find the Big Sur ISO all over the place to download. I, for one, like to create it myself using another macOS native machine like a Macbook. I know some of you don’t have access to a dedicated macOS environment and it’s probably the reason why you are following this guide.

I just like to know that the iso is clean and not injected with anything malicious. It’s nice to have another place to sync data from icloud, respond to imessages and pull up synced notes on a separate vm.

Once you’ve clicked on the Get button. Continue downloading Big Sur which sits at roughly Depending on your network connection the download time may vary. Once the download completes, you’ll be prompted with the install window to Continue. You’ll now have the Big Sur App listed under your application folder. This is what we’ll use to convert it into an iso in the next step.

Next we’ll need to run a series of commands to mount the installer to ultimately convert to an iso to be used by ESXi. This command will then prompt you for the administrator password for your specific device. Once you enter it in, you’ll be logged in as the root user which is the account we’ll use to execute the rest of the commands. So please ignore the screenshot below that has a volume size of Then finally we need to convert the image to a. Not to be confused with a Compact Disc Recordable.

Once you run the command below you should see a BigSur. Now all we need to do is simply rename the file to. I like running the mv move command in place below to essentially do a rename of the file. Don’t forget to change the username path to your own username.

Or you can simply rename the actual file by:. I hate leaving trails of data all over the place. So let’s cleanup after ourselves. If you remember initially we created the bigsur. Let’s clean up this directory with the following command. This command force removes everything in the directory specified without prompting for confirmation. Next we need to navigate to the VMware homelab environment and transfer the newly created BigSur.

For purposes of this guide, I’ll simply upload it to a datastore. Navigate to the directory of the BigSur. Select the BigSur. Now that the. There is an unlocker written in python that modifies the vmware-vmx file to allow macOS to boot. Without this unlocker , it simply doesn’t work and just does a boot loop.

It’ll show the Apple Logo loading screen and then ultimately displays an error. Your computer restarted because of a problem. Press a key or wait a few seconds to continue starting up. Disclaimer: This unlocker should not to be run in a production environment. This workaround is only to personally evaluate and have a macOS environment for purposes of testing. You’ll first need to download the unlocker zip file here if you didn’t do a git clone.

However, if you simply downloaded the unlocker zip file, your downloaded file should be named esxi-unlocker-master. Once you’ve obtained the esxi-unlocker Upload this to the same location we uploaded the BigSur. SSH into your host and navigate to the unlocker location. Once there, unzip the unlocker using the following command.

It’s a Unix archive format. These are common to Unix or Linux systems. It’s basically their version of. For esxi-unlocker-master. Now that we’ve extracted the archive, we can run the install patch. There is actually a validation checker to make sure the patch is successful when installed.

Let’s do that first. Run the following command to validate. We see the result obviously shows false since we’ve not yet installed the patch. Now let’s do that. Run the following command to install the patch. For the esxi-unlocker-master.

From here you’ll be able to view all the above files to run the patch. Before running the patch you may receive a ” Permission denied ” error. Simply navigate back one level using the command ” cd.. After running the permissions command, we can navigate inside the folder again using ” cd esxi-unlocker ” Once we’ve run the install “.

In the same command window, you can simply type reboot then hit Enter. Once the ESXi host is back up, ssh into the host and navigate to the same location where we unzipped the Unlocker file. We are going to want to run the validation command again to see the result. Now we see the result is quite different. We should now be able to install macOS without running into that boot loop. Now that the unlocker has been installed and verified, let’s now continue on to install Big Sur.

Next type out a name for your new VM. Select the following options from the drop down menu for the rest of the categories. When finished, click on Next. The next option is to configure the hardware specs of the VM. Remember, this is located on the datastore we’ve uploaded it to in an earlier step. Once done, click on Next.

Finally, let’s power on our newly created VM to see if it bypasses the boot loop since applying the Unlocker patch. Ok so let’s continue on with the install. Choose your language of choice and click on the bottom right arrow.

We’ll need to format the newly provisioned disk so that macOS can recognize the disk to install itself to. Don’t be fooled by the initial time it tells you the install will be done by.

In reality it took over an hour or so. VMware Social Media Advocacy. ESXi , vCenter , vSphere 7. Do you have an idea of the problem? Hi Alexx. Are you doing this in the browser?

Does the same thing happen if you use VMRC? I can confirm that I also ran into this problem with the Browser console. Switching to VMRC fixed it. VMware Unlocker 3. Finally figured it out, my boot usb was failing and ESXi could no longer write to it. Swapped it out for a small SSD and reinstalled, everything is now working great!

Convert vmware workstation 6.5 to esxi free.Configure Autostart of VM on VMware ESXi

 
 
There is a process built into VMware Workstation that allows you to easily copy a virtual machine running in Workstation over to your ESXi host. Select the virtual machine, go to ‘VM’ on the menu and ‘Manage”. Here select the ‘Upload’ option. Select the ESXi host we connected previously.