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VMware Converter 4.0 Available

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VMware recently released the GA version of vCenter Converter 4.0 (see release notes).  Converter allows you to convert your physical machines into virtual machines (P2V).   While Converter 4.0 is a plug-in for vCenter, the best news of all is that it also runs  standalone and is now available as a free download.

A quick summary of what’s new in Converter 4.0:

New Physical Source Support including P2V of Linux Servers and Desktops

  • New physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu) as source
  • New physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
  • Support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft

Minimal Downtime during P2V Conversion

  • Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes in the physical source system during the P2V conversion process

End to End P2V Automation & Centralized Management

  • Work flow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, destination start-up 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 will be laid out in the new destination virtual machine
  • Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type

Legal Archiving Via Virtualization

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One of the great things about working directly with customers is learning about all the wonderful things that they are doing within their enterprises.  A recent example that impressed me from a cost savings and “wow, hadn’t thought of that” perspective is a customer of mine that is using virtaulization to archive computer systems to meet their legal requirements.

We all know the old jokes about the armies of lawyers that large companies have.  Just like most jokes, there is always some truth behind that.  And one of the things that these laywers usually need to deal with is how to archive data to meet the companies legal needs.  Rather than just backing up the data, they have been saving and archiving the entire computer on which the data lives.  Literally stacking boxes of desktops and servers into secure rooms in case the data on them in needed in the future.

Can you imagine the expense of that?  Or even the operational nightmare when a lawyer needs to retrieve data from one of them…bring in the fork lift!

What one of my customers is exploring is using virtualization to solve this problem.  With the help of VMware vCenter Converter they can P2V all the physical machines that Legal needs to archive in virtual machines and then just store them on a secure data store.  With a small ESX cluster, they verify that each conversion was successful by powering on the VM and then archive it.  If a lawyer needs access to a data, it a simple matter of booting up the VM on the small cluster and pointing them to the machine over the network.

All of this at a much lower total cost than moving and storing physical machines.  Capture the data and reuse the resource.