My first test was pretty successful! I had exported from my virtualcenter my old Portege 7200 to an ovf file on my current laptop with VMware workstation. This I managed to import and run. Cool! The only fly in the ointment being the bug in ovftool which gives an error when parsing the ovf file. I got round this by upgrading to the latest version of ovftool and running it manually to convert the ovf to a vmx file and then importing that.

The next challenge is, of course to move the VM I used today back to my VC, to make it truly portable. Changing formats multiple times is not practical so I need to see what I can do with a USB stick, which harps back to my datastore on a USB stick search of last year (still not supported by VMware). Should still be able to use one to store the VM files though.

Next experiment.