Best free tool from vmware is vmware converter

If you do not know about vmware converter you are either new at vmware or brain dead, however I feel it would be remiss of me to not mention it for any newbies.

So here is the link http://www.vmware.com/products/converter if want to learn more about what vmnware converter is download and read the user guide.

Brief over view:
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone is a scalable solution to convert virtual and physical machines to
VMware virtual machines. You can also configure existing virtual machines in your vCenter Server
environment.

Converter Standalone eases the exchange of virtual machines among the following products.

• VMware hosted products can be both conversion sources and conversion destinations.
• VMware Workstation
• VMware Fusion™
• VMware Server
• VMware Player
• Virtual machines running on an ESX instance that vCenter Server manages can be both conversion sources
• and conversion destinations.
• Virtual machines running on unmanaged ESX hosts can be both conversion sources and conversion
• destinations.
• You can also use VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) images to create VMware virtual machines.

I use it to clone VM's and to make Physical Servers into VM's (remember if you make a physical into a virtual you need to uninstall the video and NIC type special driver manager stuff from the VM as it will just be wasting resources on your VM). I also use it to move a VM from one vhost to another if you do not have Vcenter and I have used it to change the drive size of IDE hard drives to large or smaller as needed.

NOTE: unless you have vcenter or vsphere web client  DO NOT MAKE THE VM's VERSION 10 as version 10 can only be edited from the vsphere web client or the powerCLI command line. Make them version 9 or less. However there is a post about how to convert a version 10 to 9 in this blog.