A junior on my team asked me last week, “How do I move a VM from VMware to KVM without losing data or breaking the network?” It’s a solid question — not because the tools are missing, but because the failure points are subtle: disk format quirks, firmware mismatches, and driver assumptions baked into the guest OS. Yes, you can migrate a VM from VMware to KVM cleanly. But success depends on understanding what happens during disk conversion, how bootloaders resolve root devices across hypervisors, and why paravirtualized drivers matter even when the underlying hardware is abstracted. This vmware to kvm migration guide covers the mechanics, not just the commands. You’ll see exactly how qemu-img handles VMDK variants, why virtio breaks first boot on unprepared guests, and how to repair initramfs when the kernel panics on boot. One migration once left me stuck for two hours because /dev/sda became /dev/vda — and the fix wasn’t obvious until I checked the initramfs modules. Let’s walk through it step by step.…