Convert a VMware Fusion virtual machine to VirtualBox on mac

I needed to convert a virtual machine created on VMware Fusion 9, to make it run on VirtualBox 5. To do that, you need to convert the virtual machine to the Open Virtualisation Format (.OVF).
These are the steps to accomplish this:

  • Locate the file of the VMware virtual machine you want to convert
  • Right-click and select Show Package Contents
  • Copy all these files to a new folder
  • Download and install the VMware OVF Tool. This is a command line tool that will do the conversion.
  • Open Terminal and execute the following command 
    ovftool <source image>.vmx <target image>.ovf

    The conversion can take quite some time. For me, it took about 3 hours for a 140 GB Windows 8 image

  • Once the conversion is finished, open VirtualBox and from the File menu, select Import appliance

After the import, power on the VM, uninstall the VMware Tools and install the VirtualBox Guest additions.