🐧 VMware to KVM migration guide — common pitfalls and how to avoid them

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,