Virtual-to-virtual conversion

April 14, 2023

Vladislav Karaiev

StarWind Head of Marketing. Vlad has more than 12 years of IT experience, specializing in cloud, virtualization, and data protection. He possesses extensive knowledge in architecture planning, storage systems, hardware sourcing, and research.

Introduction

Most physical servers these days are virtualized, running hypervisors to host virtual machines. There are numerous cases where we need to migrate from one hypervisor to another. It’s not a big deal, after all, as IT does not exist in a static world.

Problem

Different hypervisors use different VM disk file formats, so there’s no way to simply move a VM from one hypervisor to another. Some virtualization platforms have their own tools for VM conversion, but these tools are often limited in features and usually provide only a one-way conversion path. This results in added complexity and a steep learning curve for new users.

Additionally, the difference in hardware configurations has to be mitigated, as migrating VMs across hypervisors running on different hardware often results in boot-up issues and driver errors.

Solution

Thankfully, there is a universal free tool that makes the whole process a breeze. StarWind V2V Converter does exactly what its name says: it converts VMs from one format to another. It supports bi-directional conversion of all popular VM file formats, including VMDK, VHD/VHDX, QCOW2, and StarWind’s native IMG. All major hypervisors, such as VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Linux KVM, and Xen-based virtualization platforms (Citrix Hypervisor, XenServer, xcp-ng), are supported. Moreover, you don’t need to create copies of the source and destination VM files on your local machine, making the conversion process simpler and less time-consuming.

To address compatibility issues, StarWind V2V Converter allows the migrated Windows VMs to boot up in Windows Repair Mode, letting you reconfigure VM settings beforehand.

Conclusion

StarWind V2V enables direct virtual machine conversions from one hypervisor to another without the necessity for local file copies. By operating with a copy of the target VM, it maintains a consistent machine state and eliminates any chance of data corruption or loss.

StarWind V2V Converter simplifies, secures, and streamlines your VM conversion and migration tasks, letting you focus on making the most out of your virtual environments.