From VMware to Anywhere: The Art of VM Conversion with NetApp's Shift Toolkit

Moving house is one of the most pointless activities in the world.

Sure, the outcome is amazing! A new house means new spaces, improved quality of life, and perhaps it's even physically closer to the places you work and visit. But the act of moving inspires dread in even the most organised homeowner.

First comes the endless parade of boxes: getting them out, filling them, and labelling them so you remember where things have been placed. Then there's protecting the most critical items with bubble wrap (which inevitably requires buying an excessively large roll). Finally, you face the challenge of either tetris-ing everything into your car or hiring a moving company that absolutely does not see your precious items the same way you do.

It's a recipe for anxiety and additional costs that you'd much rather spend on some new furniture and a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the new place - at least, I know I would!

A virtual moving van

So what does moving house have to do with virtual machines? Perhaps surprisingly, it has a lot of parallels with moving applications in IT. Virtual machines initially made things easier: they're like having pre-packaged boxes filled with your favourite items, readily transportable as long as you're moving between the same kinds of virtualisation environments. VMware to VMware, or Hyper-V to Hyper-V.

Recently, however, there's been an uptick in customers changing their virtualisation platform entirely. It's like not only moving house, but moving from an open-plan architecture to a terrace. Suddenly things don't even fit through doorways, let alone in the space you had envisioned. Packaging that works for VMware doesn't work for Hyper-V, and characteristics of even the underlying disk formats is different.

Back when I was in the trenches, migrations were a real Project, complete with trying to explain to our non-technical PMs (I love you guys) why we needed "yet another" CAB request for downtime. And then making sure that VMs were "the same" when they came back up on the other side? All of this was just busy-work. Of course, now when we do these migrations we don't have as much luxury of time, and requesting downtime is normally met with an incredulous laugh.

Making the move easier

The good news is that making a virtualisation platform shift is not impossible, and the even better news is that it can be really, really fast - with minimal downtime. Back in ~2012 I used a PowerShell based framework that made the process easy, quick and painless (though it required automation and PS expertise). Our project converted hundreds of VMs from ESXi to Hyper-V in minutes.

NetApp has recently released a GUI - now named the Shift Toolkit - to automate the migration or conversion process. It performs a VM inventory first from your vCenter server, then converts to either Hyper-V (VHDX) or KVM (QCOW2) format. The current release also supports end-to-end migration with Hyper-V (more on that later).

One of the requirements of Shift is that the VM must be currently hosted on a NetApp NAS datastore. Under the covers, Shift uses NetApp technology (FlexClone) which is able to rapidly clone files on the volume and do the conversion in-place. And because of ONTAP's multiprotocol capabilities, you can easily convert VMs from an NFS datastore to an SMB one without even needing to move any data!

If you don't have NetApp storage today, you can also use the software-defined version of ONTAP. The same APIs are in all versions of ONTAP that allow you to do an in-place conversion. If you're using SAN on one of the NetApp unified platforms like AFF or FAS, you could migrate VMs to a NAS volume first on the same array, then do the conversion - it's very flexible.

A few common questions

Conversion vs Migration: What's the difference?

Conversion changes the format of the VM on disk. You can manually add the VMs to your preferred hypervisor at a later point (sometimes you don't want all the disks to be reattached, for example). At time of writing, Shift supports conversion from VMware to Hyper-V and KVM and vice versa.

Migration will convert the disks as before, and then add the converted VM to a new datastore for the destination hypervisor. Migration adds appropriate host tools, does network mapping and even powers off the source VMs. At time of writing, Shift supports Migration from VMware to Hyper-V.

Is Shift secure? Is it fast?

One of the benefits of doing an in-place conversion is that there is no data movement through a third party service: in other words, the change happens on the disk, on a clone of the original virtual machine. While this doesn't address all aspects of security, it means there's less moving parts and less possibility that conversions can fail.

The use of the NetApp FlexClone technology also accelerates conversion speed. Since there's no need to move the whole virtual machine around, like other methods require. Whether you're converting a 100GB or a 1TB disk it takes just seconds to do the disk conversion.

You will need login details for the source and destination virtualisation environment (e.g. ESXi or Hyper-V) and the NetApp storage array, and these are requested through the GUI.

What are some of the other methods available?

Microsoft SCVMM can do a V2V conversion from VMware to Hyper-V, and it's also supported as PowerShell if you want to automate the conversion process.

VMware has a native vCenter converter, in the event that you're migrating into VMware environments. This is one of the areas that Shift excels in - it can convert either way.

And of course - many other third party solutions exist, some of which will do bulk conversions and migrations as well.

The major challenges with alternative methods include potential licensing costs, overall time to complete a project, and downtime to actually convert active virtual machines.

The Flexibility of NetApp's Shift Toolkit

The NetApp Shift Toolkit is cost-effective if you're using NetApp storage or curious about its potential. When you need a flexible, GUI-based tool for virtualisation conversions, the Shift Toolkit offers a solid option and will only get better with more features over time. We're seeing more companies exploring multi-hypervisor configurations where there isn't just one virtualisation platform, but perhaps two or even three in an environment. The Shift Toolkit is an easy way to minimise downtime during VM migrations.

Looking for a demo? Throw me a note in the comments.

Links and Resources

1. Download NetApp Shift Toolkit (you will need to be logged into the NetApp Support Site): https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/tools/tool-eula/netapp-shift-toolkit
2. NetApp Shift Toolkit Documentation: https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/netapp-solutions/vm-migrate/migrate-overview.html