I’ve been looking at the recent VMware Converter 4.0 release, and can’t help but think it spells trouble for PlateSpin. Converter is one of those products that’s kind of evolved from good enough for small time use to blossoming into an Enterprise worthy product. Now I must admit, I didn’t pay that much attention to Converter 3 - the demand for a single X2X migration tool in the Enterprise killed any chance it had of knocking PlateSpin out at my place. But alas, times change, budgets are tight and most places have a fair amount of experience with virtualisation by now. So when we looked back and saw that there wasn’t a single V2P migration in the past year, the old notion of placing high priority on a V2P backout plan for converted workloads was starting to look a bit wobbly.
Lets stack up some of the features quickly. Both support 32 and 64 bit migrations. Both support the major Linux distros (RedHat, Suse, Ubuntu) and the most popular filesystems (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS). Both can personalise the guest (including Windows services startup). Both can run tasks concurrently. Both do hot migrations. Both support the currently shipping versions of Win… oh hang on. Sorry, PlateSpin doesn’t have Windows Server 2008 support. WTF? OK, sure it may not be massively deployed yet, but the product has been out for a YEAR. Both have nice GUI interfaces.
Now, let’s compare the price. VMware Converter: free. PlateSpin Migrate: A ton of licensing options, none of them cheap. Hmmmm. The rest of the features listed here are fading into insignificance, fast.
Oddly absent from the VMware Converter 4.0 release was an enterprise
counterpart. No prizes for guessing why. But I’m hoping the team aren’t
just resting until the release of VI 4 - they still got some work to
do. What you ask? First and foremost, it needs it’s own API or
integration with the VI API. PlateSpin has this currently, and it’s
only my laziness that’s stopping me from reverse engineering the fuck
out of it (it’s all web services, but undocumented). Logically
following from that, it needs to be PowerShellified just like Update
Manager. The server can run on Linux if it has to, but don’t give me
some cruddy command line executable with inconsistent switches and
cyptic XML input files for each little piece of the VMware puzzle.
Message to VMware - A UNIFIED MANAGEMENT CLI WOULD BE MOST WELCOME. And
there’s none better than PowerShell. Finally… V2P support. Yes, I will
make ppl go through hell and high water to get back onto a physical
box, but sometimes ppl just need to be shown that their app issues have
fuck all to do with virtualisation. If I have a quick and easy way to
V2P something and then take it straight back, I can throw down the
gauntlet to the doubters by offering a painless process to prove
virtualisation is not to blame, should the need arise. Having V2P is
kinda like having kung fu skill - you have it so you need never use it 
So I’ll be looking very seriously at VMware Converter 4.0 for an Enterprise migration tool. If you are like me and haven’t given it much of a chance for the past few years, maybe it’s time for another look.
DISCLAIMER Yes there are other products on the market (, I’m looking at you) but I only write about what I have used. Unfortunately I haven’t had my hands on their products in the enterprise to date.