Vmware Vcenter Converter Standalone 6.2 Supported Os
Justina Ky
Creating a new virtual machine as well as installing and configuring all necessary applications can take a long time. Fortunately, when you need to migrate your workloads from a physical server to a VMware virtual machine (VM), you are not required to create and configure a new VM from scratch because you can use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone to convert a physical machine to a virtual machine. VMware vCenter Converter Standalone can also convert Hyper-V VMs to VMware VMs as well as converting VMware VMs from one format to another.
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone is a free application that can be downloaded from the VMware website and installed on Windows for converting supported types of machines to VMware virtual machines. The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone featured in this blog post is called Standalone because it can be installed on the operating system of a custom machine. There are two other types of VMware Converter which are not currently supported:
Only VMware vCenter Converter Standalone is considered in this blog post and sometimes can be referred to simply as VMware Converter for more convenience. If you are looking for VMware P2V converter, use VMware vCenter Converter Standalone.
Hot migration is the process of converting a machine that is in the powered-on state. Hot migration is not recommended for converting Active Directory Domain Controllers. It is highly recommended that you stop all possible applications and services that write data on disks before starting hot migration.
Cold migration is the migration of a source machine that is in the powered-off state. Cold migration is recommended for converting MS Exchange servers, database servers such as Oracle or MS SQL, and other servers on which data is dynamically changed when a server is powered on (to preserve the data consistency).
If the data on disks remains static, you can perform hot migration. Cold migration of physical servers can be performed if you boot from the live CD and run the process of converting a physical machine including disks drives and the operating system.
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone agent must be deployed on the remote Windows machine in this case. You should select whether to uninstall the agent files when import succeeds automatically or not. Then, hit Yes to continue.
Once the agent is installed, you can view source details. Notice that VMware Converter 6.2 recognizes Windows Server 2019 as Windows 10 Server 64-bit. Hit Close, then hit Next in the Source System window.
Step 2: Destination System. Select the destination type that can be a VMware Infrastructure virtual machine or VMware Workstation virtual machine (that can run on VMware Player and VMware Fusion). As a physical machine running Windows Server 2019 used in this example must be converted to a VM running on an ESXi host, VMware Infrastructure virtual machine must be selected in VMware Converter for this step; select the destination server. If an ESXi host is managed by vCenter Server, you have to enter the IP address or DNS name of vCenter Server in addition to entering the login and password of the user who has administrative privileges on vCenter Server.
Step 4: Destination Location. Select the ESXi host, cluster or resource pool that is connected to the selected Datacenter and select the datastore available on that ESXi host. There must be enough free space on the selected datastore. If the modern operating system is installed on a source machine, you can select the latest available virtual machine version (hardware version) for the destination VM. The virtual machine version that can be selected also depends on a version of the destination ESXi host.
Data to copy. Select which disks and volumes you want to copy. You can select thick or thin provisioning type for destination virtual disks (you should select advanced view) and resize volumes if needed. In this example, a physical disk that contains two volumes is converted to a thin provisioned virtual disk. It is recommended that you tick the checkboxes:
Services. On the Source Services tab, you can select which running services on the source Windows machine to stop before starting P2V conversion with VMware Converter. On the Destination Services tab, you can select the startup mode for services on the destination VM.
Step 6: Summary. Check your settings for the new machine conversion job you created and if everything is correct, click Finish to start conversion in VMware Converter.
After machine conversion is started, wait until the conversion process is fully completed. The time needed for conversion depends on the amount of data stored on the source machine disks and network speed.
Converting a Hyper-V VM running Linux to a VMware VM of the ESXi format was covered in our first blog post about VMware vCenter Converter. Converting a Hyper-V VM to a VMware VM is a good idea, but sometimes you need to convert a VM running on VMware Workstation to a VM running on ESXi. For example, you can create and configure a VM on your local machine running VMware Workstation and then migrate the VM to an ESXi server to use that VM in the production environment.
If a Workstation VM is running on VMware Workstation, VMware Player or VMware Fusion that is installed on a remote machine running Linux or macOS, you can copy that VM to a shared folder (or share the VM folder) and use VMware Converter installed on your local Windows machine to perform V2V conversion. Hence, you can convert a VM, even if a remote physical machine running the hypervisor has Linux or macOS installed as a host operating system.
In this example, we will understand how to convert/migrate a Linux VM (OpenSUSE 15.1) running on VMware Workstation to a VM running on an ESXi host managed by vCenter Server. Configuring V2V migration for VMware VMs is similar and even easier compared to the P2V migration explained above.
Step 1: Source System. You should hit Powered off and select VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine in the drop-down menu. Then, browse the virtual machine configuration file (the VMX file). You can view source details if needed. On each step, click Next to continue configuring the conversion job.
Step 2: Destination System. Since the destination VM is expected to run on the ESXi host, select VMware Infrastructure virtual machine as the destination type. Then, enter the IP address/hostname of the ESXi server if you use a standalone ESXi host, or the IP address of vCenter Server if the ESXi host is managed by vCenter. After that, enter the user name and password of the administrative account used to manage that server.
Step 4: Destination Location. Select the required ESXi host that belongs to the Datacenter selected in the previous step. Next, select the datastore to store VM files and choose the virtual machine version.
Step 5: Options. Set up the necessary parameters for the conversion task. In the Advanced section, you can see the yellow warning icon that is displayed because the Reconfigure destination virtual machine option is inactive. This is no cause for concern; proceed forward.
Once the VM is migrated to the ESXi host managed by vCenter, open VMware vSphere Client and start the VM. Check the status of VMware Tools and verify whether all necessary services inside the VM are working correctly.
Step 1: Source System. Select source type: Powered Off; VMware Infrastructure virtual machine. Next, enter the IP address or hostname of the ESXi host, a VM from which you would like to convert. Enter the appropriate ESXi host credentials with administrative privileges. Hit Next on each step of the wizard to continue.
Step 3: Destination System. As we are converting an ESXi VM to a VMware Workstation VM, select VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine as the destination type. Then, select the version of VMware Workstation or VMware Fusion, set the VM name to be used after conversion is complete, and select a location for the virtual machine.
If you need to perform V2V migration from VirtualBox to VMware Workstation or VMware ESXi, you can use a variety of different methods: converting virtual disks, exporting to an OVF template, etc. One of such methods is outlined below.
Having VMs running on ESXi hosts provides you with advantages from the data protection side. You can perform ESXi VM backup on a host level with features such as incremental backup and use VMware vStorage API for Data Protection. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can protect your VMs in VMware vSphere in the best way possible.
NAKIVO website uses cookies for the purposes of analytics and to ensure the best browsing experience for the website visitors in accordance with our cookie policy.
You can reject cookies at any time in your browser settings.
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone provides an easy-to-use solution to automate the process of creating VMware virtual machines from physical machines (running Windows and Linux) and other virtual machine formats. Through an intuitive wizard-driven interface and a centralized management console, Converter Standalone can quickly and reliably convert multiple local and remote physical machines without any disruptions or downtime.
CAUTION: During cloning of powered on Linux machines, Converter Standalone 6.1 preserves the following source file systems on the destination: ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, vfat, and xfs. All other source file systems are converted into ext3 or ext4 file systems on the destination virtual machine.
Features from prior releases of Converter Standalone are described in the release notes for each release. To view release notes for prior releases of Converter Standalone, click one of the following links:
Converter Standalone installation fails when the selected installation folder name contains non-ASCII characters
Converter Standalone installation fails if the installation folder name contains non-ASCII characters and the OS locale is different than the locale of the characters. If there are characters from two different locales mixed in the folder name, the installation fails because there is always a character with different locale than the OS locale.
Workaround: Make sure that all the non-ASCII characters in the folder name are from the same locale as the OS locale.