VM /ETC

VMware has just released the latest version of it’s free, stand alone physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool, vCenter Converter 4. I’ve been using this version for customer P2V migrations since it was publicly available as a Beta, and I have been extremely impressed. With several features not available in any previous release (including the Enterprise version included as a plugin of vCenter 2.5), I strongly recommend VI admins download a copy of vCenter Converter 4 Standalone.

Check out the new features listed in the Release Notes:

The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone release adds several new features including:

• Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE and Ubuntu) as source
• Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
• Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes to physical machine during the P2V conversion process
• Support for converting new third-party image formats including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
• Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, automatic start-up of the destination virtual machine as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
• Target disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes are laid out in the new destination virtual machine
• Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type

Let em re-emphasize some of the features that I find to be “game changers” for a free P2V migration product.

Live migrate Linux source physical machines. Despite a post title to the contrary, the Malaysia VMware Communities Blog has already tested a successful Linux source P2V.

Install VMware Converter on a centralized Linux or Windows system and access remotely with a client to run P2Vs. You can still install it locally on the source to be migrated as well. You have the option for both during the installation.

Clone incremental changes from a source server to a target VM. You had to use other P2V tools to do this previously. I never had a chance to test this. Frankly, I’ve never had a situation before now where I thought it was necessary. It makes more sense to me in a pure migration scenario to schedule down time and migrate. Maybe this is a good fit for a free back up to VM solution?

No longer do you need to manually shut down or disable Windows services before the migration on the source server. Now you can select which services to stop on the source as well as the state of the services when the new VM boots straight from the vCenter Converter GUI.

Now you can select the target VM .vmdk disk layout. Spread multiple partitions across multiple VMFS datastores to support deduplication, replication, or SAN reorganization designs.

Convert multi CPU core source servers to single core VMs. No more worrying about making sure Windows is performing correctly by manually changing Windows to use a single processor HAL. I would even recommend admins consider V2Vs of existing VMs that were created as P2Vs with the older VMware Converter. If you haven’t corrected your VMs already, let version 4 of the standalone Converter do it for you!

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