Dan's Take

Migrating Virtual Machines to the Cloud

5nine Software Launches Updated V2V Easy Converter.

• By Dan Kusnetzky
• 03/17/2017

5nine Software launched an update to the company's V2V Easy Converter that is designed to support enterprises requirements to migrate virtual machines (VMs) to and from hybrid or public cloud infrastructure.

The new version supports the following migration paths:

• Hyper-V VMs to Azure
• VMware VMs to Hyper-V
• Hyper-V and VMware VMs to Amazon's AWS EC2

The company claims "5nine V2V Easy Converter Version 8.0 provides a non-intrusive, automated solution for migrating VMs to private, public and hybrid cloud environments. Its low cost and ease-of-use enable organizations to quickly migrate VMs to a range of different formats from one, single package. It is optimized for production environments with its software-based and agentless design, requiring no additional hardware."

The product offers an 'easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI)' designed to guide enterprises through each step of a migration process. The product includes wizards to provide a unified experience even through different VM products are being deployed.

The company also claims "5nine V2V Easy Converter Version 8.0 scales for any size and topology of datacenter. It minimizes migration risks, provides IT and cloud teams with greater flexibility, and fills in gaps of native tools and competing solutions."

5nine Background
5nine Software is a Microsoft Gold Partner. The company is known as a provider of Hyper-V security and management solutions.

The company offers agentless security and management technology for Hyper-V. The goals of their products are ease of use, cost reduction, increased levels of productivity and security benefits. The company claims that it has more than 100,000 customers.

Dan's Take: Worth a Look
As we've seen recently, enterprises relying on cloud computing sometimes face outages. That, by the way, is to be expected, and should be part of enterprise DR plans. Enterprises need to consider how to move applications into and out of the cloud, and be able to test these migrations to assure they won't find their IT operations dead in the water because of a supplier outage.

5nine's approach appears to present the characteristics IT administrators mention to me when they're talking about cloud implementations. They want something that makes disparate cloud services appear to be a seamless array of processing capability. They are looking for tools that unify management of a complex, multi-cloud computing environment. Since they might be working with a mixed VMware/Hyper-V/AWS VM environment, they want to know that their applications and application components can easily be moved from on provider to another or from on-premises to the cloud.

I asked if the company had plans to support KVM and containers, and was told that those things were on their radar, but they were waiting for customer demand to grow. Enterprises who rely on Hyper-V and are using AWS or Azure ought to know 5nine and their products.