Everyone,
My final solution to the moving a Centos 7 machine to VMWare turned out to be the use of vCenter Converter Standalone 6.2.0.1 that has to be executed on a Windows machine. I ran this product on a kvm guest Windows 10 machine and it worked very well. The transfer had to be done while the Centos 7 machine was booted. I have used this now to transfer a kvm guest Centos 7 machine and a physical machine Centos 7 both to VMWare.
There was a problem when I booted both machines that occurred at the beginning of the boot process before the kernel was accepted. The screen was filed with error messages which stated repetitively :
"error: can't find command ':'"
I had to enter a <Cr> several times to bypass the error messages and the the boot proceed normally.
I found : https://communities.vmware.com/t5/Converter-Standalone-Discussions/p2v-redha...
Apparently the VMWare converter has a bug in it that adds ": " to the beginning of a line that starts with "#" in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
All I needed to do was to edit grub.cfg and remove the ": " that was present in many of the lines that had previously been commented.
A reboot was normal.
If any of you find a way to do this task with Linux I would surely like to hear from you, but if you are looking for a way to make a migration from a physical machine or guest machine to VMWare this worked well.
Greg Ennis