What’s New
The VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 is a substantial upgrade from vCenter Converter 4.1 and includes the following new functionality (previously found only in vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.x):
- Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux sources including:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0
- Ubuntu 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x
- Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes to physical machine during the P2V conversion process
- Support for converting new third-party image formats including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
- Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, automatic start-up of the destination virtual machine as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
- Destination disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes are laid out in the new destination virtual machine
- Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type
In addition, vCenter Converter 4.2 adds functionality not found in the standalone Converter product including:
- Support for VMware vSphere 4.1 as source and destination targets
- Support for importing powered-off Microsoft Hyper-V R1 and Hyper-V R2 virtual machines
- Support for importing Windows 7 sources
- Ability to throttle the data transfer from source to destination based on network bandwidth or CPU
- IPv6 support
Discontinued Support
- You cannot schedule recurring conversion tasks with vCenter Converter 4.2.
- Support of the following operating systems is discontinued:
- Windows 2000
- Windows NT
- VMware vSphere 4.1 is the last major release for VMware vCenter Converter plug-in. VMware will continue to provide technical support for vCenter Converter through the end of its support lifecycle. VMware will continue to update and support the free vCenter Converter Standalone product, which enables conversions from sources such as physical machines, VMware and Microsoft virtual machine formats, and certain third-party disk image formats.