Convert openVZ container to VMware

I'm trying to convert an openVZ container to VMware. Since this is planned for roughly 1000 instances, I'm looking for a different approach than reinstalling from scratch. I followed the steps in the last post: https://communities.vmware.com/message/1719787#1719787 However, when booting from a live CD, it can't find any linux partition. I also tried yum install kernel-xx which had no effect on the live CD not finding a partition so I'm assuming there's an error while converting. Does anyone know of a solution or some tweaks to the one I posted? The OS in this case is CentOS 7 on openVZ 6.

Solution

Long story short: Convert openVZ to KVM, then convert to VMWare.

create a KVM with the same OS as your container
mount the KVM image file
rsync all data to that image file
umount image file and start and stop KVM
convert img to vmdk with qemu-img
move vmdk file to esxi host
convert to thin-provisioned vmdk with vmkfstools

I had to tackle (and still am) multiple issues to make it boot, like recrating initrams, reinstalling policykit, reconfiguring networking, adjusting grub.

Hope this helps someone.