Is it possible to use the free VMWare player virtual machines Microsoft provides via http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools#downloads in VMWare ESXi?
I downloaded a WinXP IE8 machine, from which I extracted a .mf, .ovf and .vmdk. I can open the .ovf in ESXi 5.5.0 no problem, but during this setup, there's no opportunity to use a pre-existing virtual disk, even if I have uploaded it to one of my ESXi datastores.
I tried finishing the template set-up and then replacing the .vmdk created by that process, however, this resulted in an unbootable machine.
I also tried converting the .vmdk using VMWare Converter (no option to do this) and seeing if I could export a machine after loading it in VMWare Player. No luck there, as VMWare Player doesn't see to have an export option.
Can someone help?
UPDATE – SOLVED, see my answer below.
Best Answer
SOLVED - The answer was actually blindingly simple, and merely something I missed while deploying the OVF template. When choosing the disk provisioning strategy, you must select "thin provisioning" and then the .vmdk file supplied by Microsoft will be uploaded from the desktop (and presumably converted on-the-fly).
I missed this, as I chose the default option - thick provisioning, which resulted in an incompatible disk file.