Virtualize a physical computer (P2V) with VMware Workstation 16 or 15

6. Size of the virtual machine

As you can see in your VM settings, VMware uses a dynamic virtual hard disk (where space is not preallocated) by default, and the contents are stored in multiple files instead of one.

If you want to copy your virtual machine to another computer, simply copy the folder ending with "-share" to a USB key.
Note that the folder without the "-share" suffix is empty (oddly).

Since VMware Workstation 16, there is only one folder created.
It's therefore this folder (without the "-share" suffix) that must be copied if you want to transfer this VM to another computer.

As you can see, this folder contains your entire virtual machine.
In our case, its size is 27.4 GB.

As you can check through the "Computer Management" -> Disk Management console, all partitions of the physical PC will be copied to the virtual hard disk.

Also note that VMware may copy some of the files from the virtual machine being created into the virtual hard disk of the virtual machine itself.
Nevertheless, this copy is useless and is only a hundred MB instead of tens of GB that the real virtual machine.
Don't hesitate to delete this partial copy from the virtual machine to free up some space.

7. Copy the virtual machine to another computer

Once the conversion is complete, you can safely copy this virtual machine to another computer and use it with VMware Workstation 10.0 or later.

As you can see, we copied this virtual machine to another computer (and thus to another folder).

Just tell VMware Workstation that you copied it by clicking : I Copied It.

And the virtual machine starts without problem.
So, it doesn't depend on the physical PC used as a source.

However, Windows may detect a new network location.

And that Windows asks you to restart once the virtual machine (most likely because of the change of processor).
Indeed, the processor of the host PC was not the same in the 2 physical computers used in this tutorial.