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What is VMware Converter?

VMware Converter is a highly robust and scalable enterprise‑class migration tool that automates the process of creating VMware virtual machines from physical machines, other virtual machine formats and third party image formats. VMware® Converter uses a snapshot based cloning mechanism to increase the reliability of the conversion and enables remote conversions without disrupting the source server during the process.

Benefits of VMware Converter

• Convert physical machines running Windows operating systems to VMware virtual machines quickly, reliably and without any disruption or downtime.
• Import older VMware virtual machine formats to new VMware virtual machine formats
• Convert third‑party formats such as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (formerly Symantec LiveState Recovery) and Microsoft Virtual Server/Virtual PC to VMware virtual machines
• Enable centralized management of remote conversions of many physical servers or virtual machines simultaneously
• Populate new virtual machine environments quickly from a large directory of virtual machine appliances
• Create a clone of a physical machine for disaster recovery purposes.
• New in VMware Converter 3.0.1‑Restore VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) images of virtual machines to running virtual machines

How Does VMware Converter Work?

VMware Converter is managed through a simple, task based user interface that enables users to convert physical machines or thirdparty disk image formats or VMware Consolidated Backup images of virtual machines to VMware virtual machines in three easy steps:

• Step 1: Specify the source physical server, virtual machine or third‑party format to convert.
• Step 2: Specify the destination format, virtual machine name, and location for the new virtual machine to be created.
• Step 3: Create/Convert to destination virtual machine and configure it.

VMware Converter achieves faster speed of conversions through the use of sector based copying ( vs file level copying in other products). VMware Converter first takes a snapshot of the source machine before migrating the data, resulting in fewer failed conversions and no downtime on the source server.

VMware Converter communicates directly with the guest OS running on the source physical machine for hot cloning these machines without any downtime and as such has no direct hardware level dependencies.

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