One feature that many Workstation 7 customers have asked for is the ability to convert a physical PC running Windows 7 into a virtual machine that can be run inside of Workstation. Until now, the easiest way to do this, was to purchase a copy of Fusion and convert your Win 7 machine to run on a Mac, copy the VM over to your PC and open it in Workstation.
Thankfully, VMware has made this significantly easier to do! Last week, VMware released the 4.3 version of the standalone VMware vCenter Converter. This application can convert a single machine (or an entire datacenter) into virtual machines and the 4.3 release handles Windows 7!
The VMware vCenter Converter is free – you can download it from https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=converter after going through a couple of registration steps.
The Workstation engineering team plans to make this even easier for our users but in the meantime we are glad you have a reasonable alternative!
The VMware vCenter Converter release notes (including what else has changed) and documentation can be found here: https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/converter_pubs.html
Happy converting!
