After few months in public beta, the VMware Converter 5.1 Standalone has been released. I wrote an article on that – Nice Update VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.1 (beta) where I introduced the new features, like the support for Virtual Hardware version 9 or GUID Partition Table (GPT) Disk support. Also EXT 4 as an filesystem support is a good step forward for converting Linux systems.
For those of you who don't know, VMware Converter 5.1 standalone version is used separately from vCenter. As you might know, in the past this was a part of vCenter and there has been possibility to do a P2V operations right directly from within vCenter. This is no longer the case since the vSphere 5.0.
What's new in VMware Converter 5.1 Standalone?
- Support for virtual machine hardware version 9
- Guest operating system support for Microsoft Windows 8 and Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- Guest operating system support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
- Support for virtual and physical machine sources with GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks
- Support for virtual and physical machine sources with Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)
- Support for EXT4 file system
VMware released the final version of the free converter software:
Quick tips for using VMware Converter:
- How-to disable SSH encryption to speed up the conversion process.
- How to use VMware Converter to Synchronize changes when P2V (or V2V) – (Poor man's DR scenarios)
- How-to Reduce VMDK size: VMware Converter
