VMWare 6.5 Fusion compatibility

Question

I moved about 6 VM's created under Vista OS running VMWare workstation to my iMac yesterday, and much to my amazement, they all worked just fine (and performed reasonably well at that).

Then I created a new VM, Windows 7 Ultimate on the Mac (in fusion 3.0.1) which also ran amazingly well.

However, now I want to move a VM created on the Mac back to my PC running either workstation or the free vmware player...but it doesn't want to work.

Anyone know if there is a reason this shouldn't work? or what I need to do to get it to work?

Answer 1

One of the strengths of the VMware platform is that you can move VMs between different products.

Different VMware products support different versions of the VMware virtual hardware. If you need to move virtual machines between different VMware products, you need to be a little careful which virtual hardware version you use. This page describes what products support what hardware versions; Virtual machine hardware versions.

In Fusion (version 3 at least), there is a menu option to "Downgrade Virtual Machine". I recall VMware Workstation allowed you to actually specify which previous virtual machine version to use.

I have used VMware Converter to convert between VMware versions before.