virtualization.info

The startup 5nine Software, which emerged from the stealth mode in June 2009, announced its third product: Migrator for Hyper-V.

Their first solution, P2V Hyper-V Planner, is a physical to virtual migration engine that also performs some capacity planning, by comparing the consolidation plans in case you use VMware or Microsoft hypervisors. 

Migrator is a superset of the P2V Hyper-V Planner, which attempts to merge the capacity planning, P2V migration, and ongoing placement optimization in a single software. It makes a lot of sense.

It integrates with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 and performs the following tasks:

• Automatic provisioning of virtual machines
  Provisions virtual machines that are used for migration; all parameters of such virtual machines are calculated as part of the migration plans.
• Hardware pre-processing
  Performs analysis of the physical machines, and identifies factors preventing successful migration and suggests corrective actions utilizing comprehensive built-in Knowledge Base. It helps to increase the rate of successful P2V conversions.
• Automated P2V Migration Jobs Processing and Migration Helpers
  When performing actual migration of physical machines - alerts system administrator of the actions to be taken to complete successful migration in case physical machine was not migrated automatically (e.g. offline migration instead of online, installing required Service Packs or modifying the software/drivers installed, etc.

Labels: 5nine, Capacity Planning, P2V/V2V Migration

So far the Microsoft customers that wanted to convert their physical boxes into Hyper-V virtual machines had to buy and use System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and its physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool.
Or buy and use a third party P2V migration tool like the ones offered by Novell/Platespin or Quest/Vizioncore.

Other less expensive (free in some cases) tools allow to perform the P2V migration as well but they usually don’t permit to convert the machine while it’s running.
Now there’s a free tool that performs a live migration: Disk2VHD.

The tool was released by the worldwide popular Mark Russinovich, founder and former Chief Software Architect at Sysinternals/Winternals and now Microsoft Technical Fellow, a couple of weeks ago.

Disk2VHD runs on any Windows system starting from XP SP2 and Server 2003 SP1.
It performs the live migration leveraging the Volume Shadow Service (VSS) like most commercial software do.
The converted VHD can be booted with a Hyper-V or Windows Virtual PC virtual machine. Or you can mount it inside the Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 file system.

Like most Systinternals tools it’s a stand-alone executable that can you can even launch online.

It doesn’t have many options but it’s the perfect companion for Hyper-V if you are in evaluation.
And with some PowerShell help it probably can do a lot more.

Labels: Microsoft, P2V/V2V Migration, Tools

In December 2007 PlateSpin launched Forge, a hardware appliance which embeds VMware VI 3.x and uses the company’s P2V migration technology to simplify the way customers do disaster recovery.

The company updated the platform to version 2.0 exactly one year ago, months after being acquired by Novell.

Earlier this month Forge reached version 2.5, introducing the following features:

• Support for Windows Server 2008 & Windows Vista
  (both file-based and block-based live replication)
• Support for Block-Based Transfers with 64bit protected systems
• Server Sync Block-Based Transfers
• Physical Machine Server Sync
• Support for replications longer than 24 hours
• Role-Based Access & Multi-Tenancy

Novell offers the following unit packages:

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

After the release of Migrate 8.1, Novell releases Protect 8.1.

Both Migrate and Protect come from the original PlateSpin PowerConvert. Novell split it in these two products after completing the acquisition of its subsidiary.
The idea behind this move is that customers may want to use the P2V migration engine for disaster recovery (something that PlateSpin evangelized for years) and so they want to have specific features for this task.

The new Protect 8.1 introduces the following features:

• Live incremental replication with block-based transfers
• File-level restore
• Support for live incremental replications in V2P migrations
• Support for VMware vSphere 4.0, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista

Labels: Disaster Recovery, Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

After the acquisition of PlateSpin, Novell made several changes inside its subsidiary.
virtualization.info already published some of them, like the migration of the development team in India and the replacement of several members that left after the acquisition.

Novell also split the original PlateSpin PowerConvert in two products: Migrate and Protect.

Migrate gets a new update this week, reaching version 8.1.
The product now supports Windows Server 2008 (it’s not clear if this includes the imminent R2 edition but probably not), Windows Vista and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. But the major new feature of this release is the support Sun Solaris 10.

This support is very specific: the P2V migration can be performed only from a physical Solaris box with SPARC architecture to a Sun Solaris 10 Container (aka Zone).
The other way around is not available at the moment, and it’s not possible to perform a live migration.

The capability is supported through a dedicated version of the product called Migrate for UNIX, which Novell prices at $1,495 for a flat, perpetual license.

PlateSpin is the first company to offer such capability and it certainly is a welcome addition to the already rich feature-set that PowerConvert always offered. Anyway it’s worth to note that Sun offers a free P2V migration tool that perform a similar task since October 2007: it migrates Solaris 8 and 9 physical SPARC boxes on a Solaris 10 container (of course still on SPARC architecture).

The time of the announcement is not casual: now that Oracle acquired Sun, nobody exactly knows what will happen to the Sun Solaris operating system and the SPARC architecture.
If Oracle wants to kill SPARC as some are predicting, Sun customers may have to drop their systems sooner rather than later, and in many cases the mandatory, intermediate step is to consolidate them into fewer boxes.

Labels: Novell, P2V/V2V Migration, PlateSpin, Releases

Citrix just release the first minor update for its P2V/V2V migration tool XenConvert 2.0.

This version introduces the support for OVF contents created with VMware vSphere 4, plus it enhances support for OVF and VMDK files created with other VMware products, including VI 3.x, Workstation 6.5.2, Studio 1.0, OVF Tool 0.9, Converter 3.0.3 and 4.0.

The product is free and available here.

Labels: Citrix, P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

A security researcher near virtualization.info, Claudio Criscione, informs us that VMware Converter 4.0.1 Stand Alone includes a web interface that is currently hidden or unfinished.

It’s a well-known thing that the product uses a web service to interact with the ESX hosts, but it seems that VMware is developing a complete web user interface around it.

At the moment the product only exposes a login form if you connect to the address: https://ipaddress/converter/
but several other functions are partially implemented, like for example the file upload facility that is handled by the FileInput.js component.

It’s unclear way VMware is shipping this partially finished interface inside the product or if there’s a concrete plan to finish it.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, VMware

Yesterday, with a single step, a new startup called 5nine entered two crowded and market segments: the P2V migration and the capacity planning ones.

P2V migration tools have been progressively included into every major virtualization platform: VMware, Microsoft and Citrix for sure have their own, and Oracle has three R&D departments now to produce a cool one as well.
The fact that all of the are available for free negatively impacted the business of the other vendors in this segment, which are struggling to survive.

So far none of the competitors in this space had the farsightedness to merge the migration tools with a capacity planning platform, so to accelerate the virtualization adoption and justify the existence of stand-alone P2V tools. 
5nine seems to have exactly this strategy.

The US startup was probably founded earlier this year and seems privately funded.
It doesn’t expose much about its management team right now. The only two executives we know about are Dr. Konstantin Malkov, CTO, and Ratmir Timashev, Director.
Malkov comes from PWI Corporation, a consulting firm where he was the owner and CTO.
Timashev is the well known President of Veeam, so it’s easy to guess that in the future 5nine and Veeam will do business together.

The first product released by this startup is called P2V Hyper-V Planner.
As other capacity planning tools, it builds and maintains an inventory of the physical machines in the data center, tracking the usage of the application workloads and calculating different migration plans depending on business constrains and what-if scenarios.

5nine offers a free version of this product which seems only able to perform P2V migrations and provide basic reports.

The competition in the capacity planning space is remarkable, with VMware, Novell/PlateSpin, CiRBA, Lanamark and recently Liquidware Labs/VMsight.
On top of that it’s worth to highlight that Microsoft already offers a capacity planning tool for Hyper-V called MAP which is completely free.

5nine is now included in the virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar.

Labels: 5nine, Capacity Planning, P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

StartWind software is famous company in the world of storage because of their free iSCSI target for Windows systems (which is supported inside VMware, Microsoft and Citrix virtual machines).

The company has recently increased its activity in the virtualization space and released yesterday a free Virtual to Virtual (V2V) migration tool dubbed V2V Converter.

The tool is able to turn a VMware VMDK virtual hard drive into a Microsoft Hyper-V VHD one and vice versa.
If customers want the tool can even convert the vHD in the IMG format that StarWinds uses for its iSCSI Target.

V2V Converter, which performs a sector by sector copy on the selected target, is available without limitation here.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

Citrix is working to release as much as possible in time for its Synergy conference in May.
While waiting for the beta of XenServer 5.1 (or whatever it will be called) the customers can now download the just announced XenConvert 2.0 technical preview.

XenConvert is the XenServer physical to virtual (P2V) and virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool.

This new version will import VMware virtual machines in VMDK format and OVF packages (it doesn’t matter which virtualization product generated them). 
Citrix is a member of the DMFT so it implemented the support for the new OVF 1.0 standard as soon as possible.

As most readers know by now Citrix decided to give XenServer away for free so the P2V/V2V migration tool becomes a fundamental part of the strategy to move customers away from VMware.
It’s easy to guess that the final version of XenConvert 2.0 will be free as well and that the company will invest on this product much more in future.

Enroll for the beta here.

Labels: Citrix, P2V/V2V Migration

After more than one year VMware is finally ready to release a stand-alone version of its physical to virtual (P2V) / virtual to virtual (V2V) migration tool that matches the one embedded within VI 3.5.

So far the Standalone version (formerly split in Started Edition and Standalone Enterprise edition) of the product was frozen at version 3.0.3 and it’s unclear why the company took so long to upgrade it.

The new 4.0 version (build 146302) includes:

• Support for Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux distributions as source
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as source
• Support for Parallels Desktop virtual machines as source
• Incremental hot cloning (Converter now replicates any change happening to the source machine during the P2V migration)
• Power off source machine at the end of the conversion
• Selection of the target virtual disk and virtual volumes configuration
• Configuration of the target virtual machine

This product (now available in a single edition) remains available free of charge. 
VMware published an insightful comparison between this version and the one included with VI 3.5:

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, Releases, VMware

Today PlateSpin launches the first update of its flagship product, PowerConvert, since the Novell acquisition.

This new major release introduces some some welcome features:

• Virtual to Physical (V2P) migration for Linux operating systems (Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux)
• Incremental imaging
• Support for 64bit Windows Server 2003 in P2V migrations
• Support for Citrix XenServer 4.1 P2V/V2V migrations

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, Releases

virtualization.info has just learned that PlateSpin, leader in the P2V migration market, has been acquired by Novell.

The canadian firm acquisition further boosts Novell visibility in the virtualization space.

Novell already has a major involvement in the market since the early days of Xen development in 2004, when the company was announcing the inclusion of the open source hypervisor in its SUSE Enterprise Linux.

After that first step another acceleration was provided by the interoperability agreement signed with Microsoft in 2006.

PlateSpin is a valuble acquisition target for Novell not just because of its flexible migration tool, PowerConvert, but also because of the other products in its offering: a capacity planning tool, PowerRecon, and most of all a new disaster recover solution called Forge.

These technologies will probably go integrated with the Novell management solution ZENworks, adjusted to handle virtual machines since end of 2006.

At the moment nor Novell neither PlateSpin officially announced the acquisition. This will probably happen tomorrow, when VMware VMworld Europe 2008 will open in Cannes, France.

virtualization.info will publish a live coverage of the morning keynotes and all the other virtualization vendors announcements. So stay tuned!

Update: Novell announced the acquisition, which is worth $205 million and will complete in Q2 2008.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Radar has been updated accordingly.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

Just before the end of the year PlateSpin releases a relevant minore update to its flagship product PowerConvert.

The new version 6.8 introduces some remarkable updates which clearly expose how the company is looking at Microsoft like never in the past:

• Enhanced migration (P2V Server Sync via Take Control) for Windows source OS (through live snapshot plus incremental copy of modified data during P2V conversion)

• Support for Microsoft Virtual Server R2 Service Pack 1 as destination virtualization platform
• Support for Windows Volume Shadow Service (VSS) as snapshot method
• Support for Windows 2000 Update Rollup 1 as source OS
• Support for encrypted (FIPS) virtual hard drives and partitions in Windows source OS
• Support for logical volumes (through LVM) in Linux source OS
• Bandwidth compression and throttling for block-based transfer

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

Canadian virtualization firm PlateSpin, leader in P2V migration segment, announces today a new minor release for its flagship product: PowerConvert.

Version 6.6 introduces the important capability to perform incremental migration (thorugh block-level data replication), making PowerConvert even more suitable for disaster recovery scenarios.

PlateSpin PowerConvert 6.6 is immediately available. Customers have the flexibility to choose from a range of perpetual licensing options as well as per use pricing options for one-time projects. For disaster recovery projects, customers can also purchase a mix of block-level and file-level transfer licenses to ensure the right level of protection for each individual workload.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

VMware finally releases its next generation of physical to virtual (P2V) / virtual to virtual (V2V) tools. blending together old P2V Assistant (P2V capabilities) and newer VMware Importer (V2V capabilities).

Converter 3.0 (build 36853) is available in 2 versions, Started Edition and Enterprise Edition, which only differ on quantity of concurrent migrations available and target platforms.

Enterprise Edition is able to perform multiple migrations and deliver migrated images directly into VMware ESX 2.5 and 3.0 platforms, through VirtualCenter. Stardard Edition can perform only one conversion per time and can deliver on VMware Player, Workstation and Server (including older GSX editions).

This tool represent a remarkable step further for VMware, not so popular for its P2V Assistant, introducing:

• hot migrations (no need to shutdown source machine)
• support for multiple migrations (only Enterprise Edition)
• support for all VMware and Microsoft platforms

Converter 3.0 represents a strong hit for this virtualization niche, since VMware is releasing both editions for free (Enterprise Edition is available at no cost buying VirtualCenter 2.x and 1.x).

At this point older and well established vendors like PlateSpin (with its PowerConvert) as well as newest contenders like Invirtus (with its today released Enterprise VM Converter) may have to change strategy to justify product price, following two different paths:

• move from simpler P2V/V2V migration to more complex datacenter automation (PlateSpin is right this way integrating PowerConvert with PowerRecon)
• focus on different target platforms, including Microsoft, Parallels and XenSource/Virtual Iron ones (smallest and newest competitors may prefer this way)

In all cases small businesses are gaining a huge benefit from this competition, now able to really start virtualizing at minimal costs thanks to VMware Converter and Server.

VMware Converter 3.0 Starter Edition can be downloaded here.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Update: VMware immediately updated Converter 3.0 RTM build (now build 39557) for a problem on embedded license (both Starter and Enterprise editions).

Everybody already downloaded it should do it again.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

• Incremental transfer Enables customers to perform an initial full system replication of a physical production server into a virtual recovery environment and then propagate changes at user-defined intervals to maintain synchronicity between production and recovery environments
• Integration with 3rd party data replication tools Allows for effective restoration of more mission critical servers in ways not previously possible

• Data exchange with PowerConvert Seamlessly transfer plans from PowerRecon to PowerConvert for automated implementation of a complete end-to-end optimized DR strategy

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

Surgient, the leader in Virtual Lab Management Applications for automating software test, training and demo labs, and PlateSpin Ltd. today announced a co-development and co-marketing agreement in which PlateSpin’s PowerConvert OS Portability technology will be integrated with Surgient’s Virtual Lab Management Applications. ... Today, customers can use Surgient’s Virtual QA/Test Lab Management System (VQMS), Virtual Training Lab Management System (VTMS) and Virtual Demo Lab Management System (VDMS) together with PlateSpin’s PowerConvert to capture, convert and import software configurations. Surgient Virtual Lab solutions and PlateSpin PowerConvert are being more tightly integrated with the integrated solution available in early 2007...

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration, Virtual Lab Automation

PlateSpin Ltd. and Virtual Iron Software today announced a new technology and business partnership that will help users assess the best opportunities for enterprise-class virtualization in their data centers and streamline solution deployment. The companies have agreed to develop joint product offerings for users and resellers as well as collaborate on marketing and sales efforts. ... With the agreement, PlateSpin, which provides software that analyzes physical and virtual resources and provides OS portability between physical and virtual environments, will support Virtual Iron’s enterprise-class virtualization and management platform. PlateSpin PowerConvert is an automated software solution that enables customers to migrate data, applications, and operating systems across physical, virtual, blade and image-based infrastructures in any direction. The combination of PlateSpin PowerConvert and Virtual Iron will provide users with the ability to migrate physical servers into Virtual Iron virtual infrastructure to quickly achieve the benefits of large-scale server consolidation, rapid provisioning, high availability and capacity management. General availability is planned for November. The companies also announced that they will make available PlateSpin PowerRecon with support for Virtual Iron at the same time. ... Virtual Iron will bundle one free migration of PlateSpin PowerConvert with every Virtual Iron Consolidation and Enterprise Edition license. Subsequent migrations will be available for purchase from Virtual Iron and PlateSpin authorized resellers. Virtual Iron will also offer a server assessment solution as well as a server consolidation bundle through its network of authorized resellers...

• PlateSpin believes Xen (which Virtual Iron will use as virtualization engine for its upcoming 3.0 version) will likely be used in corporate environments
• PlateSpin preferred the Xen implementation provided by Virtual Iron over the one provided by XenSource

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

PlateSpin released the new major version of its acclaimed physical to virtual (P2V) migration tool: PowerConvert 6.0.

This version introduces following new features:

• Drag-and-drop virtual machines from VMware ESX Server 2.5 and VMware Server into VMware Infrastructure 3
• For production virtual machines running Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows XP operating systems, the virtual machine remains live as its OS, applications and data are migrated to new VMware Infrastructure 3 hosts with only a brief (one- to five-minute) interruption
• Completely automate the Discover, Configure and Convert functionality
• Optionally reconfigure CPU, disk, network and memory resources on the new target virtual machine
• Upgrade multiple virtual machines simultaneously onto new VMware Infrastructure 3 hosts

PowerConvert 6.0 will be generally available August 4th. Pricing starts at $45 per conversion and includes the live transfer functionality.

The virtualization.info Virtualization Industry Roadmap has been updated accordingly.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

• SSL / 128-bit encryption for high security settings
• PowerSDK for programmatic control
• extended support for SUSE 9 and Acronis 9

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration

PlateSpin Ltd. today announced the general availability of the next release of its PowerConvert™ product, used in more than 500 enterprise data centers across the world. PlateSpin PowerConvert provides anywhere-to-anywhere OS Portability™ for optimizing the use of Intel-based data center resources. From most any source, to most any target in the data center, PlateSpin PowerConvert automates the migration of data, applications and operating systems to the servers that best match the service level needs of the workload, all from a single point of remote control. “PowerConvert is being used by multi-infrastructure data centers to accelerate the adoption of virtual infrastructure by enabling rapid server consolidation (P2V), de-virtualization (V2P) capabilities for application support, streamline business continuity with flexible recovery (I2P, I2V) and to manage hardware migrations including upgrading to blade servers (P2P),” said John Stetic, Director of Product Management. “The increased functionality and broader features with this newest release further strengthens PowerConvert’s position as the de facto standard for IT managers looking for a new level of adaptability.” New features available in PlateSpin PowerConvert 5.1 include:

• Full Windows Dynamic Disk support provides the ability to convert Windows-based source servers with dynamic disks (including software RAID) to virtual machines, other physical machines, or to image archives
• Built in support for Incremental Third party Images which lets data center managers automatically deploy the latest incremental image captured from Acronis TrueImage or Symantec LiveState, streamlining the recovery process
• A new Conversion Analyzer Tool provides detailed reports based on the inventory features of PowerConvert that result in the reduction of conversion planning times especially for server consolidation projects
• Automatic control of the startup state of Windows and Linux services for deeper application configuration during a conversion
• A revamped mechanism to improve the overall support for a broad range of source and target hardware
• Integrated Job Scheduling allows users to schedule conversions to run at a date and time most convenient and appropriate for the service requirements of their data center. When combined with the existing email notification feature, data center managers can optimize by exception reducing hands-on time during projects
• Built-in integration with IBM Director gives IBM users centralized control of server consolidation and migration projects

Arthur Amos, Head of Technology Infrastructure at Nationwide Building Society, said “PowerConvert has enabled Nationwide to automate migrations of servers across our Enterprise without having to be in physical contact with either the source or target machines, eliminating weeks if not months of labor and enabling us to realize a quicker return on our investment as we accelerate our move to a virtual infrastructure. The addition of Virtual to Physical (V2P) migration capabilities in PowerConvert helps to protect our investment. It is clear that the benefits of PowerConvert are real and measurable.” Current PlateSpin PowerConvert customers with a valid maintenance agreement can upgrade from PowerConvert 5.0 to 5.1. PlateSpin PowerConvert 5.1 is available today for use with industry leading server technologies, image archives, and virtualization products such as VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server and Microsoft Virtual Server.

Labels: P2V/V2V Migration