Can a VMWare Fusion image be run on a windows machine.

Question

May I burn in flames if this has been answered.

At work I use a Windows XP Pro machine for my development and at home I use a Macbook Pro. I am thinking of shifting my development environment over to virtual machines using VMWare Fusion (on the mac). My question is, can I open a virtual machine image created on my Mac with my windows computer at work?

E.g. Create virtual server on Mac with VMWare Fusion, clone it to a USB stick, bring it to work and use it at work, save it back to usb stick, go home and copy it back to the mac and continue working.

Answer 1

Of course you can.

Answer 2

I believe I have found what I was looking for on the VMware website.

Encapsulation A virtual machine is essentially a software container that bundles or “encapsulates” a complete set of virtual hardware resources, as well as an operating system and all its applications, inside a software package. Encapsulation makes virtual machines incredibly portable and easy to manage. For example, you can move and copy a virtual machine from one location to another just like any other software file, or save a virtual machine on any standard data storage medium, from a pocket-sized USB flash memory card to an enterprise storage area networks (SANs).

Hardware Independence Virtual machines are completely independent from their underlying physical hardware. For example, you can configure a virtual machine with virtual components (eg, CPU, network card, SCSI controller) that are completely different from the physical components that are present on the underlying hardware. Virtual machines on the same physical server can even run different kinds of operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc).

When coupled with the properties of encapsulation and compatibility, hardware independence gives you the freedom to move a virtual machine from one type of x86 computer to another without making any changes to the device drivers, operating system, or applications. Hardware independence also means that you can run a heterogeneous mixture of operating systems and applications on a single physical computer.

Answer 3

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: What shows up as a single file on OSX just shows up as a directory with multiple files on Windows. Machines are quite portable between virtually all VMware systems, when first creating the machine and viewing the advanced options you can select what level of "compatibility" you would like to use. This basically adjusts the virtual hardware devices to only use those that are supported by your target compatibility level. For maximum compatibility I generally create VMs targeting Workstation 5 with ESX Server compatibility. This gives me a image that is 100% portable between Workstation 6, Fusion, ESX, VMWare Server and VMWare Player. If your images were created in Fusion, they'll be portable to Windows (i.e. VMWare Workstation 6.5) with no issues.

Answer 4

Yes, just right click on the virtual machine file (on your mac), select "Show Package Contents", then select the first file that says "Your Operating System" -s001.vmdk or the biggest file and copy it to your flash drive or whatever you are going to use to transfer it to your windows machine. That .vmdk file is compatable with vmware workstation and virtualbox (a free version by oracle, but you need hardware acceleration).

-mx