Faster virtual machines with VMware Converter 3

NEW DELHI: VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced the general availability of the Enterprise and Starter editions of VMware Converter 3, the newest release of its migration tool.

“Customers are accelerating their migration from physical systems to a virtualized infrastructure, so the ability to perform large-scale conversions is important to the thousands of VMware customers who are standardizing on VMware virtual infrastructure,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of product marketing and solutions at VMware. “As the only freely available conversion tool on the market today, VMware Converter Starter also offers customers new to virtualization a simple path toward virtualizing their infrastructure.”

VMware Converter 3 automates the Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) and Virtual-to-Virtual (V2V) conversion process for creating VMware virtual machines from physical machines, other virtual machine formats or third-party image formats. The VMware Converter Starter edition enables one conversion at a time and is free of charge. The VMware Converter Enterprise edition enables multiple concurrent conversions and is available at no additional cost to VMware customers who have current support and subscription contracts for VMware VirtualCenter Management Server.

Experienced virtualization customers and those new to the technology alike can implement virtualization quickly using the intuitive wizard-driven interface of VMware Converter - it automates many manual steps previously required to convert physical machines to virtual machines, such as booting off a CD and having to physically touch each server.

“Support for remote cloning and hot cloning, which can be done from a single management interface, are two great new features in VMware Converter,” said JC Kowal, infrastructure administrator for The Timken Company, a manufacturer of tapered roller bearings. “Hot cloning is a great way to move old applications without any downtime on the source server, which is important to us because with older systems we worry they won’t come up again if we power them down. And since I work remotely, I value not having to boot the physical machine from a CD to capture an image. Now I can just create the image, no matter where I am, and bring it up live on the new host. Our facilities group comes in and unracks the old server and now we have more space in our data center—and I never have to physically touch the server.”

VMware Converter’s central management console enables customers to easily manage thousands of conversions and benefit from:

Pricing and Availability

VMware Converter Starter is available free of charge at www.vmware.com/products/converter. VMware Converter Enterprise is available at no additional cost to VMware customers who have current support and subscription contracts for VMware VirtualCenter Management Server.