After three months since launch of Converter, 3rd generation of its P2V migration tool, VMware is ready to launch first minor update.
Anyway Converter 3.0.1 (build 44840) is not just a bug fixes release, since it introduces some remarkable new features:
- Capability to import VMware Consolidated Backup images
- Partial capability to import StorageCraft ShadowProtect images
- Experimental command line interface (for Enterprise Edition only)
First feature is particularly important: VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), introduced with VMware Infrastructure 3, is not a real backup solution, but more a sort of proxy, helping 3rd party backup solutions to access virtual machines stored in SANs facilities.
VCB anyway is not currently providing any help in restore saved virtual machines, and customers have to find their own way to perform this operation.
Introducing this new capability in Converter, VMware is seriously simplifying restore but it’s also showing future directions for disaster recovery: possibly in near future VMware Converter will be the only backup solution, performing a virtual to image (V2I ?) migration for backup, mimicking approach currently taken by PlateSpin.
Download the free Started Edition here.