You can use this link to get access to the VMware Converter 4.0 Beta Program.
Welcome to the VMware Converter 4 beta program. We are excited to announce that VMware Converter 4 beta is now available. Your involvement in beta testing VMware Converter 4 is an important part of the release process, and your timely and thorough feedback is critical to the success of the beta program and to the release.
As part of this beta, we request you to extensively test several areas of feature enhancements including P2V support for Linux and Win 2K8 sources, hot cloning enhancements as well as workflow automation enhancements. Your active participation in this beta program is critical. We appreciate and value your efforts to install upon downloading the software and actively provide us with your valuable product feedback.
Introduction to VMware Converter 4.0 Beta 1
VMware Converter provides an easy-to-use, scalable solution for migrations of machines, both physical to virtual and virtual to virtual. With its comprehensive and comprehensible wizards and task manager, VMware Converter converts virtual machines faster, with fewer manual steps required, and fewer source hardware limitations than other methods. With its ability to perform hot cloning, VMware Converter can convert to a virtual machine with no downtime on the source system.
VMware Converter eases interoperability among VMware hosted products (Workstation, VMware Server, VMware Player, and Fusion), unmanaged ESX Server 3.x, ESX Server 3i Embedded, ESX Server 3i Installable, and ESX Server 3.x, ESX Server 3i Embedded, ESX Server 3i Installable managed by VirtualCenter 2.x.
What's New
The VMware Converter 4.0 Beta 1 release has several new features, including:
- Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux (RHEL, SUSE, and Ubuntu) as source
- Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Windows Server 2008 as source
- Support for converting new third-party image formats, including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
- Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, destination start-up as well as shut down one or more services at source and start up services at Windows destination
- Power off source machine when conversion is finished
- Hot cloning improvements for cloning any changes to the source system during the P2V conversion process
- Target disk selection, and ability to specify how the volumes will be laid out in the new destination virtual machine
- Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type
- Known issues described in the Known Issues section
The following features are no longer supported:
- NT4 hot cloning
- ESX Server 2.5 destinations
