October 10, 2017 – At the Nutanix .NEXT 2017 conference (North America), Nutanix announced a tool that would simplify Virtual Machine (VM) and database migrations to a Nutanix private cloud.
Today, Nutanix has publicly released those tools – known as Nutanix Xtract for VMs & Nutanix for DBs.
Up until today, cross-hypervisor VM migrations were possible via a multi-step approach such as:
- File-system whitelisting of Nutanix Storage
- Mount the AHV container as an NFS datastore to vSphere
- Storage vMotioning VM(s)
- Convert VM disks to AHV by importing into the Image Configuration Service
- Create new AHV VM and attach imported Windows disk to the VM
Today, Nutanix Xtract for VMs allows for agentless live-migration of Virtual Machines from VMware ESXi to Acropolis AHV – with minimal downtime.
- Streamlined migrations with one-click simplicity
- Near-zero downtime with full cutover control
- Simple test migrations and roll-back capabilities
- Cost efficient – included with all Nutanix software editions
In keeping with the Nutanix release cycle, today is another day of innovation — for you, the customer, at no additional cost.
Translated:
- More efficient
- Less impactful
- Automated
- And, no cost! 🤑
Nutanix Xtract for VMs has the following functionality upon the v1.0 GA release:
- 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
So… starting today – you, the customer, can now migrate your Guest OSes supported by AHV from vCenter and ESXi 5.5, 6.0, and 6.5 to Acropolis AOS 5.0.x and 5.1.x.
There are a few Unsupported Features that you should note, but otherwise — in so few words…
- Select your VMs
– Map ESXi port group to AHV target network
– Schedule time for migration to complete
- Grab your beverage of choice and wait for a periodic sync to destination
- Perform final cutover/migration of VM
Upon final cutover, the source VM is shutdown and the target VM is brought up live on Nutanix AHV.
Nutanix Xtract Software can be downloaded within the Nutanix portal site:
https://portal.nutanix.com/#/page/xtract
Stay tuned for a video showing the entire conversion process.
Say goodbye to your #vTax!