After following this nice physical to VMWare conversion guide, things were working great except that there was no networking, and I saw this weird error..

 host smbus controller not enabled

After some googling, I found this which led to this, which said to do:

 sudo rm /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

I did that, and now things are working great! It seems pretty incredible to me, to be able to totally convert a physical Linux machine into a virtual one!