VMware takes a swing at Nutanix, Red Hat with KVM conversion tool Scarcely a day passes without The Register's virtualization desk being approached by VMware's rivals seeking a chance to explain the merits of their products and cash in on assumed dissatisfaction with the licensing regime Broadcom has imposed. But last month, VMware quietly took a swipe at those rivals with an updated virtual …
VMware support for converting Linux systems seems to have been rather a second-class citizen.
There were quite a few options for imaging Windows systems, but for Linux it amounted to: conversion of running systems (via ssh connection), Amazon EC2 instances and physical disks.
For Windows systems, you could also configure the target machine (choose disk controller type and network options), but this wasn't possible for Linux systems.
It appears the new tool will permit particular types of KVM disk images as conversion sources. What I'm less clear about (the information would seem to be available only to participants in the beta trial) is the extent to which the new converter will allow you to configure devices in the target machine. Desktop virtualization using KVM tends to depend heavily on Virtio (server VMs probably less so) so there's potentially a manual preparatory step in which paravirtualized hardware has to be replaced by emulated physical hardware (graphic, disk and network controllers, for example) in the virtual machine before the image is converted.
The only effort I am expending on VMWare products is migrating off of it. Which I am actively doing - albeit slowly, me being the turtle vs. the rabbit. It's going to take some time, but now that I've started, I'm not going back. My money's destination doesn't end up in Broadcom's (or its investor's) pocket's. I really wish there was a better commercial alternative that was more reasonable, but alas, they would probably be absorbed by some Borg as well.
Why is it that every good product gets purchased by a company that then destroys it in the name of pure profit? This behavior doesn't bode well for the long term business of human civilization, as it presently exists. I think in the distant future, humans are the actual predecessors of the Ferengi.
Yes, I am feeling a little bit "StarTrekky" this morning...
I just don't see much of a demand for this product / project.
Let me get this straight, Broadcom: you build a new tool to 'help' admins migrate from a free open source hypervisor...to your pay-to-play product, and a pay-to-pay product that is *reducing* licensing options yet *increasing* cost of those licenses simultaneously.
And you think World+dog is going to beat a path to your door?? o_O
Now, as for the Ferengi: too late, we're doing a very fine job (at least here in the U.S.) of mimicking Ferengi society. From Oregon's 'ground leading' legislation essentially making homelessness illegal, to the religious right's attempts to put women back naked and in the kitchen, we're doing it very well, thank you.
“attempts to put women back naked and in the kitchen”
My wife wants to be in the kitchen thank you.
Jerry Clower has a great joke about the feminist movement in the 70s and his wife.
I support my wife, and I don’t assume what her choice is. She tells me, not the other way around.
Akin to offering free room upgrades to the newly vacated first class cabins on the titanic post-iceberg.
I think I've installed my last VMware product, ever. As with so many, the only projects I'm likely to be involved with now will be frantic customers tring to migrate away before their next licence/support renewal date.
For some reason this reminded me of the old Nokia protective phone cases. Great idea, but completely pointless in reality.
Nokia phones were so tough that the case would get ruined long before the phone ever did.
This tool will see almost no use because only a fool would migrate to VMWare at this point.
It was a bit more than 'a disk image with metadata'. It was typically several files that needed to be converted into one monolithic image, that can then be copied to your new server and converted to the new ESXi format. It worked but was a real pain.
Then again, this was doing it the free way. I'm sure VCenter makes it a snap. VMWare have progressively restricted what is permitted with the free product for years. Can't blame them really, but it does make you wonder why they're targeting KVM, just when it's becoming half decent.
I always used vCenter Converter in the past for going to ESXi, at least until they gutted the functionality and prevented it working properly with later releases.
And if VMware are no longer allowing a stand-alone ESXi host with a free license, then they lose almost all the small business market.
Where next?
Can't be Xen, Citrix have taken that over and buried it.
Proxmox is good. But how will they cope with thousands of supported customers ?
Will we have to just install Debian and KVM and manage it all by hand?
Xen hasn't been buried, there's still XCP-NG. You can also build it from the bare metal, I was mad enough to run a Salix based Xen system a number of years ago using the LILO bootloader, it worked fine until I had a hardware failure. Linux dom0 naturally, NetBSD is as ever too shonky, FreeBSD lacks passthrough, Illumos Xen0 appears long dead.
Had a play with XCP-NG last week, was moderately impressed. If you want 'completely free' you'll have to install the community maintained Xen Orchestrator rather than the bundled XOA VM which pushes you towards the maintained but still 'free as in beer' 'please buy a license' XCP options, and 'set up an account with a third party to do anything useful'.
The xl and xe utilities at the command line appear solid, as does the ability to modify boot parameters without faffing around with linux-isms of grub defaults and initramfs or similar.
XOA, at least the one installable over the Internet prior to updates, seems a bit unfinished. Error messages are opaque. It is not designed for a single standalone system hosting both the VMs and an ISO storage pool. Still, xe commands can work around that.
Got VMs working including passthrough with minimal hassle.
KVM doesn't seem that bad either. A try of virt-manager and it was all working fairly easily. Passthrough is more of a pain though.
It's great that in the last seven years ish or so we've gone from virtualisation being an occasionally provided option which requires a lot of fiddling to being bundled in most available OS : Windows (Hyper V), Linux (KVM), Xen[1], FreeBSD (bhyve), OpenBSD (vmm). A basic VM is now easy. Migration is available some times. Passthrough is still a bit of an arse - too many hardware, driver, and chipset foibles out there.
[1] I'm a particular fan that Xen is a type 1 hypervisor, and that PV or PVH dom0 guests load underneath it and can therefore have devices completely hidden from them for PCI passthrough, whereas for KVM you're going to have to stick things in the initramfs or mark modules for early load or blacklist. For hypervisors such as bhyve which are still distressingly bleeding edge, whilst devices can be captured by the passthrough driver it's impossible to exclude them from being probed by the OS really early in the boot process.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
