Many IT organisations are starting to see the benefits of a flexible, mutli-hypervisor platform, allowing them to reduce costs, and scale out easily and efficiently. However the challenges involved often make this difficult and expensive, with some migrations often taken weeks or months to complete, resulting in downtime that is unacceptable in production environments.
The solution: OnCommand Shift.
Evolved from the popular MAT4Shift VM conversion tool, Oncommand Shift provides a complete end-to-end VM conversion solution of VMs from VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi to Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V or vice versa. Without moving data, OnCommand Shift provides a near-zero-touch solution which minimises downtime, while also reducing hypervisor migration costs.
By leveraging the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit, and NetApp's Flexclone technology, OnCommand Shift can convert a virtual hard disk in seconds. Currently only NAS based storage protocols are a viable option for this tool. The steps in which the process takes are as follows:
The solution: OnCommand Shift.
Evolved from the popular MAT4Shift VM conversion tool, Oncommand Shift provides a complete end-to-end VM conversion solution of VMs from VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi to Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V or vice versa. Without moving data, OnCommand Shift provides a near-zero-touch solution which minimises downtime, while also reducing hypervisor migration costs.
By leveraging the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit, and NetApp's Flexclone technology, OnCommand Shift can convert a virtual hard disk in seconds. Currently only NAS based storage protocols are a viable option for this tool. The steps in which the process takes are as follows:
- Collects and stores all VM information
- Snapshot VM - Backup of VMs and network/disk settings before conversion
- Remove Hypervisor integration tools
- Converts VM
- Restores Network configurations and VLAN setting
Bulk VM conversions can also be streamlined with multiple workflow engine integration by leveraging the OnCommand Shift PowerShell module.
In order for this to work in your environment you need the following Hardware & Software
Hardware
Supported VMware ESXi Configurations
Supported Microsoft Hyper-V Configurations
Learn more about NetApp OnCommand Shift (PDF).
Hardware
- NetApp FAS 2240 controller or higher
- Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 or later
- NFS and CIFS/SMB licensed on the controller
- Physical or virtual server to control workflow and convert virtual machines
- 2 vCPUs
- 4GB RAM
- Application: 250MB free disk space
- Conversion storage: 250GB (Minimum) / 500GB (Preferred) free disk space
- Data ONTAP PowerShell Toolkit version 3.0.1 or higher
- PowerCLI 5.1 or higher
- Microsoft Hyper-V PowerShell cmdlets
- Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5
Supported VMware ESXi Configurations
- 5.0
- 5.1
- 5.5
- 6.0 (Not in the first release)
Supported Microsoft Hyper-V Configurations
- Windows Server 2008R2 Hyper-V
- Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V
- Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V
Learn more about NetApp OnCommand Shift (PDF).