The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone documentation provides information about installing and using vCenter Converter Standalone. What's New in VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1. See vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 Release Notes. Learn More About VMware vCenter Converter Standalone. VCenter Converter Standalone Product Page.
Get a free download of VMware vCenter Converter to automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats. VMware VCenter Server Converter Standalone. Supported backup images or third-party virtual machines are: Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 or 2007 Microsoft VirtualServer 2005 Parallels Desktop 2.5, 3.0 or 4.0 for Mac VMware Consolidated Backup (Windows Converter Standalone server only). Get a free download of VMware vCenter Converter to automate and simplify physical to virtual machine conversions as well as conversions between virtual machine formats.
You can create a conversion job to convert a physical or virtual machine to a variety of destinations. You can convert powered on physical machines, VMware virtual machines, and Hyper-V Server virtual machines into VMware standalone virtual machines or virtual machines that vCenter Server manages.
The approach you take for creating the conversion job is determined by the type of source and the type of destination that you select.
Standalone virtual machines include VMware virtual machines, such as VMware Workstation machines.
For a complete list of supported source types and product versions, see Supported Source Types.
Vmware Vcenter Converter Windows
host that vCenter Server manages, or a VMware standalone virtual machine.For a complete list of supported destination types and product versions, see Supported Destination Types.
I recently had a question that came in from our field where a customer needed to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) with a specific MAC Address which was a requirement to ensure property connectivity within their network. This type of network requirement is not really new or unique, it is a common practice used to ensure only valid VMs with a static DHCP reservation can actually connect to a specific network but it certainly was the first time I had heard of this request for the VCSA.
With the default VCSA installer workflow, there is currently not a way to modify the network MAC Address which is automatically generated after the deployment of the OVA. Having said that, I have spent quite a bit of time exploring the various non-standard methods of deploying the VCSA in the past (see here, here and here) and with that information, you definitely can affect the MAC Address while still maintaining a valid VCSA deployment. With a bit of trial/error, there are two options depending if you are deploying the VCSA directly to an ESXi host (for initial setup) or to an existing vCenter Server. To demonstrate how this works, I have created a basic shell script called VCSAStaticMACAddress.sh which you can easily adapt to for a Windows-based environment.
The trick is that when you deploy to a vCenter Server endpoint, the required OVF properties are persisted which would allow you to only deploy the VCSA but not actually power it on and there you can easily augment a number of settings including the MAC Address. In the case of deploying directly to an ESXi host, OVF properties are not persisted and hence a challenge if you wish to make changes prior to powering on the VM. In earlier versions, it was possible to set these OVF properties by way of using the extraConfig property of the VM but it looks like this trick no longer works and requires a slight variation of the workflow which is described in the instructions below.
vCenter
Step 1 - Edit the VCSAStaticMACAddress.sh script to include the path to the VCSA OVA (in my example, I am using the latest 6.7 Update 3 release) and uncomment the vCenter deployment section along with the specific values for your VCSA deployment
Step 2 - Run the script which will deploy the VCSA to an existing vCenter Server and set the respective OVF properties but not actually power on the VM
Step 3 - Use the vSphere UI to update the desired MAC Address of the VM and then power it on and wait for the installation to complete (can take up to 30min). If everything was configured correctly, during the installation, you should be able to open a browser to https://[VCSA]:5480 and watch the progress of installation.
Vmware Vcenter Converter Download
ESXi
Step 1 - We need to first convert the VCSA OVA (in my example, I am using the latest 6.7 Update 3 release) to an OVF. To do so, you will need OVFTool and here is the command to run:
ovftool --allowExtraConfig VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.7.0.42000-15132721_OVF10.ova VMware-vCenter-Server-Appliance-6.7.0.42000-15132721_OVF10.ovf
Step 2 - We need to add an additional line to the network section of the OVF with the desired MAC Address as shown in the example below.