At the end of the last week VMware launched the public beta program for the newest version of its free P2V migration tool: Converter 4.0.
Converter 4.0 is already embedded into VMware Infrastructure 3.5 but the users that don’t buy the flagship platform can just use the stand-alone Converter 3.0.2, which is one year old.
It’s not clear why VMware is taking so long to synchronize the two versions.
The first beta build (122441) of the new version introduces key features that can be used with any VMware product besides VI 3.5:
- Support for Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu Linux distributions as source
- Support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008 as source
- Support for Parallels Desktop virtual machines as source
- Incremental hot cloning (Converter now replicates any change happening to the source machine during the P2V migration)
- Power off source machine at the end of the conversion
- Selection of the target virtual disk and virtual volumes configuration
- Configuration of the target virtual machine
Enroll for the beta program here.