In nearly every discussion I have with potential customers the questions comes up about how do we migrate existing workloads to Nutanix. Until today, 2017-10-09, the simple answer has been and still is that it depends on what you actually want to do. Lets say you run hypervisor X today and want to continue running hypervisor X after switching to Nutanix there are both paid & free tools available in addition to manual and or scripted processes.
When migrating to Nutanix and want to go from hypervisor X to hypervisor Y when running on Nutanix there are not many options available but still a few.
Today I’m happy to announce Nutanix Xtract for VMs where you can actually migrate your existing VMware ESXi based VMs to Nutanix AHV.
The following are supported with Xtract for VMs:
- Migrate powered on or powered off VMs
- Pause and resume migration
- Schedule migration
- Schedule data-seeding for the virtual machines in advance and cut over to a new AHV cluster
- Manage VM migration between multiple clusters from a single management interface
- Sort and group VMs for easy migration
- Monitor details of migration plan execution even at the individual VM level
- Cancel in-progress migration for individual VMs
- Migrate all AHV certified OSes
Some of the pre-reqs includes:
- vCenter & ESXi version 5.5 or higher is required
- Can not migrate from ESXI host directly, mus go via vCenter Server
- AOS 5.0 or higher is required
- VM names must using English characters
- Following is not supported per VM
- Independent disks
- Physical RDM based disks
- VMs with multi-writer disks attached
- VMs with 2 GB sparse disk attached
- VMs with SCSI controllers with a SCSI bus sharing attached
Check out the awesome Xtract for VMs video below:
Useful links:
A few words from my colleague and Xtract Product Manager Jeremy Launier
When we started thinking about Xtract, we recognized right away that migrations had to be simple. We needed to set a new standard for how cloud migrations should be. We started trying to solve this problem right around a year ago and after both an Alpha and Beta cycle which involved the migration of over a thousand customer VMs, I’m proud to make this product available for general use.