There are various tricks and hints we all use to make our daily system administration routines easier. One of them is virtual machine cloning provided by VMware vCenter Server. Great and simple thing allowing you to deploy many identical virtual machines to a group – no need to repeat the same process all over again. This is usually done in vCenter but there are several other ways you can go if it becomes unavailable.
Nowadays, virtualization has become one of the main worldwide trends in the IT sphere. The virtual environment helps saving money, making infrastructure easier to administrate, and giving more possibilities for scaling. A large variety of hypervisors from different vendors with different functionality and a number of virtual machines available for deployment are already present on the market. In most cases, hypervisor vendors have their proprietary VM types incompatible with those of competitors’. That is why sometimes it might be a challenge to deploy one hypervisor’s virtual machines on other hypervisors. This may come up with a very painful migration process between hypervisors in case of changing one, moving to different hardware or having several different hypervisors running. A V2V (virtual machine to virtual machine) converter could help solving this task. It can convert a VM and move one between VM formats and physical environments where the hypervisor is running. The review of the most popular and well-known solutions of VM converters will be provided in this article.