[Release] VMware Converter 5.5

Shortly after the release of vSphere 5.5 VMware has also updated its Converter product to version 5.5 to restore compatibility with the Infrastructure virtualization suite. But there are also some new and unexpected cool features in the new release.

What's new in Converter 5.5

• Support for virtual machine hardware version 10 (62TB disks, virtual SATA controllers, etc.)
• Support for RedHat KVM virtual machines as a source (for Online conversion!)
• A new option for selecting the network adapter for the target virtual machine
• Support for additional guest operating systems (but Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 are not yet included)
• Parallel disk conversions (great to increase conversion throughput if enough bandwidth is available)
• Virtual SAN support

The introduction of Virtual SAN support seems to be odd at a first glance, because the handling of target datastores should be done by the ESXi host transparently for Converter, but - since VSAN appears as a third type of datastore (it is object based opposed to block based VMFS and file based NFS datastores) there were probably changes/additions to the related API calls that Converter needs to handle.

Read the full Release Notes of Converter 5.5 and download it for free (MyVMware account required).

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This post first appeared on the VMware Front Experience Blog and was written by Andreas Peetz. Follow him on Twitter to keep up to date with what he posts.

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