VMware recently released build 44840 of their free virtual machine conversion software. VMware Converter provides an easy-to-use, scalable solution for migrations of machines, both physical to virtual and virtual to virtual. With its hot clone ability, Converter can even import with no downtime on the source physical machine. This latest release, 3.0.1, is considered a maintenance release. However, in addition t VMware recently released build 44840 of their free virtual machine conversion software.VMware Converter provides an easy-to-use, scalable solution for migrations of machines, both physical to virtual and virtual to virtual. With its hot clone ability, Converter can even import with no downtime on the source physical machine.This latest release, 3.0.1, is considered a maintenance release. However, in addition to bug fixes and resolving previous issues, this build also introduced some fairly significant features for a minor dot release. New features include: VMware Converter imports VMware Consolidated Backup images – Converter can restore Consolidate Backup images into ESX Server machines, and can import them into VMware standalone virtual machines. Converter supports restoring Consolidated Backup images of any guest operating system type. VMware Converter imports certain StorageCraft ShadowProtect images – Converter can import ShadowProtect images, with some limitations. These limitations include: Dynamic disks are not supported All images for the backup of a machine should be in a single folder, with no other images placed there For volume-based cloning, all volumes in the disk up to the active and system volumes must have been backed up (For instance: a disk has four partitions, 1 – 4, with partition 2 as the active volume and partition 3 as the system volume. The backup must include 1 through 3) If it is an incremental image, up to 16 incremental backups are supported Images of systems with logical drives are not supported if the default boot (Windows) partition is on a logical drive. VMware Converter provides an experimental command line interface for migrations – VMware provides p2vTool as a tool for migrating physical and virtual source machines with a command line interface. Support for this CLI is Experimental. Therefore, users cannot file SRs (Support Requests) to VMware for p2vTool-related issues. You need an Enterprise license to use p2vTool to migrate machines. The one exception is restoring a VMware Consolidated Backup image; in this case p2vTool can execute the query, verify, import, and postprocess options without needing a license if it detects that the source is a VCB image.Download it, here. Software Development