INDUSTRY

Newest Release of Migration Tool Speeds Move to Virtual World: VMware, 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. "VMware Converter is an absolutely brilliant product," said Timothy Happychuk, regional IT director for Quebecor -- Sun Media Group, a major Canadian media conglomerate. "We've been using VMware Converter aggressively to migrate all kinds of systems, including some of the most arcane machines we have. We can't get enough of it; its speed and ease of use, its broad support for source operating systems and hardware types and the improved reliability of the conversion process can't be matched by any other tool we've tried." 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: *Faster IT infrastructure virtualization. VMware Converter accelerates the process of transitioning to virtualized infrastructure by enabling fast, reliable and non-disruptive P2V and V2V conversions with its use of sector-based snapshot copying, or "hot cloning." VMware Converter takes a snapshot of the source machine before migrating the data, allowing users to transfer physical servers to virtual machines without shutting them down and eliminating the server downtime and reboots associated with traditional "cold" cloning migration tools. This results in fewer failed conversions and zero downtime on the source server compared to traditional file-level copying. *Automation and ease of use. VMware Converter's central management console enables easy management and scheduling of multiple P2V or V2V conversions. Using its simple wizards, IT administrators can convert a physical machine into a virtual one in just a few steps, and remote cloning enables them to clone machines remotely rather than converting each one manually. *Scalability. Converting servers manually one at a time is time consuming and labor intensive. VMware Converter provides a centralized management interface to enable remote concurrent conversion of many physical servers or virtual machines simultaneously for virtualization projects of varying sizes. *Broad hardware and software support. VMware Converter provides broad hardware and OS support including Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 (including 64-bit versions of these), as well as Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4 SP4+. Pricing and Availability VMware Converter Starter is available free of charge at its Web site . VMware Converter Enterprise is available at no additional cost to VMware customers who have current support and subscription contracts for VMware VirtualCenter Management Server. VMware VirtualCenter Management Server list price is $5,000.