Now, before you say “but VMware has tools to do this for you! haven’t you heard of platespin converter or VM converter?”

Well yes. But I wanted to see if it was possible. The answer is yes it is possible and would have worked flawlessly the first time around if I had also –excluded the /boot partition.

I ended up killing my VM for a while and using a rescue disk to recover.

To save you the same trouble, there are a few files on the target host you most definitely don’t want to overwrite.

Your /boot/grub/grub.conf would be one of them. Another is /etc/fstab.

Take backups of these files before executing the rsync.

On the freshly installed VM target host execute the following, where 192.168.1.1 is the src host:

rsync -av -e ssh root@192.168.1.1:/ / –exclude /proc –exclude /dev –exclude /sys –exclude /boot

Watch the magic. Restore the  backups of the files mentioned above, and have a think about any other changes that might be required before rebooting.

In my case I modified the ethernet configuration to give the machine a different IP address than the src host so that both could co-exist happily for a while.