A love for Apple’s OSX and computing devices brings some side effects. One of them is that you’re stuck with VMware Fusion which is way behind it’s Windows counterpart, VMware Workstation. Fusion cannot import .ovf VMs, just .vmx VMs. In my case, I needed to convert the vSphere Management Appliance to a VM that could run in VMware Fusion.

It took me a while to this neat tool: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf – ovftool is a utility that can convert virtual machines between certain formats.

Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can use the commandline tool to convert the .ovf to a .vmx like this:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas vMA-4.1.0.0-268837.ovf vMA.vmx

Then just double click or import the .vmx into Fusion

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