I have found articles saying this is possible, but what are the issues? Is it 'always' straightforward as shutting down your vpc and then opening it with vmware?
From this link which is nearly 3 years old it says you can but you have to copy some windows files into the vpc before shutting it down, is that still valid?
Update 1
Found this link which goes through the mouse driver issues
Just use the VMware Converter.
The one thing that you'll probably want to do is uninstall all the VPC drivers before shutting down. The VPC and VMware mouse drivers conflict and it gets all ugly and degenerates into a bunch of registry hacking to get the mouse working again if you don't do that.
Otherwise, yep. It's that simple. I converted a whole bunch of VPC machines last year (not knowing about the mouse driver issue at the time) and it was a pretty smooth process.
Once you convert your vpc to vmware you no longer need Virtual PC. VMware Workstation is much better. If someone only needs to use an existing image they can use the free VMware player.
Hi - I'm the guy who wrote that article. I hadn't tried converting any images recently (once I moved off Virtual PC, I never looked back), but I tried again tonight to see if anything had changed. It turns out that not much has changed at all.
I grabbed a virtual disk that Microsoft published to test IE6, tried to concoct a VPC to go with it, and ended up using VMWare's converter to convert this virtual disk to a VMWare disk. It opened just fine in VMWare Server, and when I powered up, the machine discovered some new hardware devices and asked for the drivers from the XP disk, just as I'd seen before. This, I believe, is due to the emulation differences between Virtual PC and VMWare.
I haven't gone and tracked down the drivers this VM is looking for, because I don't plan to keep it around for long, but my recollection is that once these are set up, the VM will work just fine.
I did this recently. Here is what you do:
Works like a charm.