StarWind V2V Converter: Simplifying Migration of VMs and Physical Hosts to Public Cloud

INTRODUCTION

The global business dynamic is shifting towards sustainability and continuity. To bypass feature paywalls established by popular virtualization vendors and to optimize CapEx and OpEx when it comes to mission-critical applications and capacity, companies turn to cloud storage. Organizations use the cloud to scale, achieve cost-efficient disaster recovery and diversity within their environment. However, to grow their profit, hypervisor vendors tighten hardware compatibility lists (HCLs) and restrict the integration of solutions from other vendors.

PROBLEM

The first problem emerges with the fact that the most popular hypervisor vendors have strict HCLs in place. Microsoft, VMware, Xen, and others allow infrastructure alterations only within their framework. They have native in-built tools to convert from physical to virtual to cloud, but they are limited by converting only into their own native formats one-way. Thus, you will have limitations in creating a diversified environment (with choosing hardware and software from any vendor you like). Also, after hours of conversion, there are chances of error in the end, which requires extensive preparation.

Then, if you would like to switch to Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure public cloud, you’d have to spend hours on inspecting their native converters in minute detail. Native converters will frequently have overcomplicated GUIs, requiring the user to manually choose all manner of possible physical disk/VM/cloud instance parameters of the conversion. It will be too confusing if one is inexperienced. Oftentimes, the wrong format or downloader error window pops up only after the migrating process has ended. As a result, one false decision during the checkbox-ticking, and the time you’ve spent on migrating your physical disk or VM will have been for naught.

And as if those issues were not enough, there is always the problem of connectivity. During the migration of physical disks/volumes/entire machines, or virtual disks/volumes/VMs, even if high bandwidth connection is in place, connection losses and other issues can easily happen. They aren’t as crucial during the transfer of fragmented data, but they are critical during the migration of VM data, for instance, especially when its voluminous in data, or if an entire machine is being migrated. If connection is lost during the transfer of such homogeneous data, you will have to start over.

SOLUTION

The solution to the first-mentioned problem is that StarWind V2V Converter supports all of the most popular VM formats. It is also capable of converting and migrating both your physical and virtual resources to either AWS or AZURE — your choice. If you happen to want to migrate from one hypervisor to a cloud of another vendor, StarWind V2V will perform all the conversion and migration for you without any issues. It has a simple intuitive interface that requires no additional education to operate. Just start StarWind V2V Converter on your physical machine or choose the desired VMs, select AWS or Azure as the cloud of your choice, press ‘Convert’ and that’s it.

StarWind V2V Converter is easy in operation and understanding, and it’s a smart tool as well. It automatically selects the parameters suitable for your chosen physical resource or VM, depending on their type and type of cloud storage to where the conversion and migration will take place. Additionally, the tool checks the VM, for example, for its compatibility with the basic parameters of the chosen cloud storage provider, which adds to the success of migrating to either AWS or Azure in one take. You won’t have any problems during the conversion and there is no risk of receiving an error notification after the process has finished, two or four hours later.

StarWind V2V Converter uses VSS snapshots to guarantee successful conversion/migration on your first try. The tool creates a ‘shadow clone’ of the source data, be it a physical machine or a VM, which it uses to ensure absence of data loss or corruption. If connection is lost during the process of your data migrating to AWS or AZURE, StarWind V2V Converter will continue controlling the process. It will check the consistency of migrated data and continue to migrate the rest respectively, from the clone. Such a feature also allows your environment to keep working without any downtime, while you migrate the desired resources to the cloud storage.

CONCLUSION

Rules are meant to be broken and boundaries are meant to be crossed. StarWind V2V Converter does just that: it overcomes HCLs and other restrictions and flaws that hypervisor vendors establish. It also expands on what a migrator/converter can be when it comes to hyperconvergence. With StarWind V2V Converter, you can easily convert and migrate your physical and virtual resources to AWS and Azure without having to fear any data corruption or loss. But the best benefit of it is: you can have all those great features absolutely for free!

You can check the list of supported VM disk formats and OS in StarWind V2V Converter Help: Specifications.