Introduction
Migrating your VMs from one hypervisor to another may be a bit of a challenge if you don’t have some decent virtual machine converter at hand. Different hypervisors have their own proprietary VM formats: VMDK, VHD and VHDX, QCOW, you name it. The problem is that one VM format can be not supported on other platforms. In this case, a V2V converter is a must-have. Now, the question arises: which converter should I choose?
How to choose?
Deciding on a proper V2V converter depends mainly on its functionality. The number one factor for me is the number of supported VM formats. There are tools that allow migrating only from VMDK to VHD/VHDX, or vice versa, or even from any VM format to any other. For example, VMware vCenter Converter Standalone allows converting any VM format to VMDK.
The second key-point you should really consider is the conversion way. It can be two-way conversion (VMDK to VHD and the other way around) or one-way (only from VMDK to VHD). If you have an environment with two hypervisors running, it would be a good solution to find a converter that supports both ways instead of installing several tools. For example, StarWind V2V Converter allows bi-directional conversion between various hypervisors.
And the final factor is the ability to change VM parameters during its conversion. It’s really useful option since it allows avoiding any incompatibility issues when migrating your VMs from one hypervisor to another. This feature is supported in 5nine V2V Easy Converter and VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.
I don’t take price into account since there are plenty of free solutions on the market. So, it’s no problem finding a good and feature-rich tool without paying a dime. All three tools I’ve mentioned above are free.
I won’t go into much details in this article and compare different V2V converters since there is a great article on VMblog already. It’s called “V2V converters review” and it will give you the detailed info on different tools, including StarWind V2V Converter, VMware vCenter Converter Standalone, 5nine V2V Easy Converter, and Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC). So, in case you’re looking for a VM converter, you really should check it out.
Conclusion
There are different types of V2V converters obviously. Some of them are richer in their functionality than others, but it’s the matter of choice. Perhaps, you don’t need the all-in-one solution, and a converter that works only with 2 VM formats is just what you need. However, you should really consider these three factors I’ve mentioned in this post when choosing a V2V converter, as it can help you make your daily tasks easier in the future.
This is the review of an article.
