I stumbled on this article a while back and stored it on a thumb drive. The original article was posted by Vladan Seget. It can be found here. If you do a lot of P2V conversions, I would recommend giving this a read over.

The steps you need to do:
01.) Download Vmware Converter for linux here.
02.) Extract the converter package on your linux server:

• # tar xf VMware-converter-4.0.3-u4.tar.gz

03.) Start the installation

• # cd vmware-converter-distrib/ && ./vmware-install.pl

04.) You can just accept the majority of the options just make sure that you activate the remoteaccess

• Do you want to enable remote access in Converter Standalone Server? yes

05.) Usually a linux server has an Apache installed on port 80, so good think to do is to add aditional port for http proxy :

• What port do you want the HTTP proxy to use? [80] 8080
• What port do you want the HTTPS proxy to use? [443] 444

06.) Also you should go and allow root to login localy

• #vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

change the line

• PermitRootLogin yes

07.) Then you just leave your linux server and go to your Windows XP or Vista Workstation and connect to your linux server remotely via http for example “http://192.168.0.1:444”
08.) Download and install the VMware Converter client.
09.) Start the Converter Client and go to Administration > Connect to another server

10.) In the credentials window just enter the IP address followed by the port number, then the root login and password.

11.) Enter the credentials once more and choose Linux as an OS family.

12.) Then just follow the assistant for the rest of the steps. As a destination you choose the ESX server IP address or hostname. There is nothing difficult with that…