VMware Standalone Converter Updated
During VMworld in San Francisco, an important update crept out for the VMware
vCenter Converter Standalone edition. It was great news for me, as I had started to wonder if the product was going the way of a deprecated product. The virtual machine conversion mechanism is still an important part of the arsenal for today's virtualization administrator. I frequently use it for additional physical-to-virtual conversions, specialized virtual-to-virtual operations such as a data center migration and to shrink existing virtual machines.
Version 4.3 was released on August 30 with two key features. The first is support for Windows 7 x86 and x64 editions; the other is support for Windows Server 2008 x86, x64 and R2 editions. This support is both for a machine to be converted as well as the platform to run VMware Converter. After installing VMware Converter 4.3, the supported operating system table only goes as old as Windows XP for Windows systems. This means that Windows 2000 has fallen off of the supported platform list for Converter 4.3. It may be a good idea to grab one of the older copies of VMware Converter while you can, in case you still support Windows 2000.
VMware Converter 4.3 adds a number of other natural platform support configurations, including support for vSphere 4.1. But perhaps the most intriguing support with this release is a broad offering of Hyper-V support. Windows virtual machines that are powered on while running on Hyper-V may be converted as well as powered-off virtual machines that run Windows Server 2008 including x86, x64 and R2 editions, Windows 7, Windows Vista, XP, SUSE Linux 10 and 11, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Microsoft .VHD and .VMC virtual disk formats can also be imported.
I've used it a few times since it was released and have not had any issues with it performing virtual-to-virtual conversion tasks. VMware Converter is still a critical part of the daily administrator's toolkit and finally made complete with Windows 7 and Server 2008 support.
Have you had any issues with the new version thus far? Share your comments here.
Posted by Rick Vanover on 10/19/2010 at 12:48 PM