I'm in need of some advice on unlinking a linked clone VM. VM's created in Workstation, now used in Fusion 3.x in OSX Snow Leoppard.
I have a Windows XP VM (named "Trusted") that is unfortunately linked to a 2 year old snapshot of another XP VM ("Surfing"). This Surfing VM has grown huge and unwieldy over the years as I've taken more and more snapshots along the way, attempts to delete some old snapshots in Fusion 3.1.4 are met with "unable to delete files" errors and after ignoring that for a bit... I of course find myself very very tight on disk space. I'd like to ditch the Surfing VM and start it over, but keep the bare minimum disk footprint of the current state of the Trusted VM.
These Surfing and Trusted VM's were originally created in Workstation, and unfortunately the Trusted VM I care about is a linked clone from a very early snapshot of the Surfing VM. They now live in Fusion 3.1.4 which seems to lack much of a native notion of what to do with linked clones other than being able to use them.
Q1: What is the appropriate way to uncouple this Trusted VM from the Surfing VM? Manual hacking on some vmx files? Would getting to Fusion 4.x be of any help? Fusion 5 is out but I think I'd have to upgrade from Snow Leoppard to do that (and I'm not sure I'm ready for that). Or... is VMWare Converter and/or v2v is going to be involved? If so, what's a way I can get that software as just a licensed Workstation/Fusion person? Appeal to the VCenter folks at work for a favor?
Q2; If so, what version of Converter or v2v would be appropriate assuming my clean copy of both of these machines was last touched by (gasp) Fusion 3.1.4 on Snow Leoppard? http://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_50_guide.pdf seems to point me in a cold conversion with Converter Enterprise 4.1.x direction for this need. But perhaps there's another way I just don't know about yet?
Thanks for any pointers!