VMware Fusion Image

I believe Fusion 3 which comes out tomorrow should have converter built in.  Barring that, you may need to install a windows image, download converter on that image and convert from within a vm.

I am going to ask around for an easier path

Scot

I got a working procedure to go from any vmware workstation to an ESX 3.5 compatible image that's deployable in the cloud.

Create images using your vmware workstation, copy the images to an NFS server, mount the NFS disks on the ESX 4 update 1 running inside the vmware workstation, and use ESX command line to convert the image from vmware workstation disk format to an ESX disk format.

So here's the exact series of steps I took:

1. Set up a small redhat image in vmware workstation and configure it as NFS server

4. create desired image on the vmware workstation

5. transfer the vmdk files to an NFS server

6. log into console of the ESX server

7. use vmkfstools -i to convert from vmware workstation disk to an ESX disk, leaving the ESX disk on the same NFS server (since it is mounted by the ESX server just as another vmfs file system)

8. get rid of the old vmware workstation disk and replace with the newly created esx compatible sparse disk (thin provisioning option)

9. use a few EMC CAAS specific tricks such as using the cloud CLI (command line interface) off of the Linux host directly to zip up the image - as transfering the converted ESX compatible disk would create a fully materialized disk (no longer a sparse file when transfered to windoze).

and yes, it is painfully slow - takes a few hours to set everything up and about 4 hours per image to go from workstation until it is in the cloud.