VMware released new version vCenter Converter 4.0

Introduction to VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone provides an easy-to-use solution to automate the process of creating VMware virtual machines from physical machines (running Windows and Linux), other virtual machine formats, and third-party image formats. Through an intuitive wizard-driven interface and a centralized management console, Converter Standalone can quickly and reliably convert multiple local and remote physical machines without any disruptions or downtime.

Benefits

• Convert physical machines running Windows and Linux operating systems to VMware virtual machines quickly, reliably, and without any disruption or downtime.
• Convert third-party formats such as Parallels Desktop, Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery, Norton Ghost, Acronis, StorageCraft, and Microsoft Virtual Server or Virtual PC to VMware virtual machines.
• Enable centralized management of remote conversions of multiple physical servers or virtual machines simultaneously.
• Populate new virtual machine environments from a large directory of virtual machine appliances.
• Ensure conversion reliability through quiesced snapshots of the guest operating system on the source machine before data migration.
• Enable non-disruptive conversions through hot cloning, with no source server downtime or reboot.

What’s New

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

The following features are no longer supported:

• NT4 hot cloning
• ESX 2.5 destination

Go check it out at VMware and read the complete release notes here 

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Daniel Buonocore

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