Following the general availability (GA) release, we've seen a strong surge in customer adoption of the NetApp Shift toolkit for virtual machine migrations. Originally built to support end-to-end Hyper-V migrations and QCOW2 conversions for KVM-compatible hypervisors, customer demand quickly expanded to include other major hypervisors such as:
- Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager
- OpenShift Virtualization
- Cloud stack and more..
Real-World Impact:
Before diving into the list of new feature set, let’s highlight a couple of real-world examples where Shift toolkit dramatically reduced migration timelines:
Customer X Migration Challenge:
- Migration Scope: 1,000 VMs to a leading KVM-based hypervisor.
- VM Size Distribution:
- Majority: ≤ 1-2TB
- Critical chunk (20TB VMs with multiple virtual disks each) – smaller, however significant portion
Traditional Migration Impact:
- Downtime per 20TB VM: ~4 days
- Business Impact: Extended unavailability of critical workloads during migration windows, leading to operational disruption.
Shift Toolkit Advantage:
- Migration Time for 20TB VM: ~5 minutes
- Improvement: ~99.8% reduction in downtime
Outcome: Seamless migration with minimal business impact
Example 2: Migration to OpenShift Virtualization
- VM Size: ~800GB
- Traditional Migration Time: ~1.5 hours
- With Shift Toolkit APIs: 5 minutes
Result: Faster migration, accelerating project timelines and reducing operational overhead
In our lab environment, we successfully migrated two VMs, each with 8TB of data distributed across four 2TB VMDKs to Hyper-V. The conversion process for 16TB completed in just 60 seconds, and the entire migration completed in under 5 minutes.
These examples highlight how Shift toolkit is transforming VM migrations from multi-day effort to minutes with automation, reliability, and scale.
What’s New in v2.2:
The latest v2.2 release introduces powerful enhancements to streamline and secure migrations:
- RAW format conversion
- Email notifications & alerts
- Simplified upgrade process
- Abort & revert capabilities
- Virtual Machine preparation flexibility
- Ability to migrate VMs with spanned VMDKs across multiple volumes
RAW Format conversion
This release introduces a REST API–based approach for converting VMDK files to RAW format, compatible with OpenShift Virtualization, OLVM, and other platforms. The conversion process is highly efficient, typically completing within seconds regardless of the VMDK size. This allows customers to run VM conversions with minimal storage overhead and near-zero downtime. The conversion is instantaneous, with no data movement, making it significantly more efficient than traditional copy-based or offload methods.
Once converted, the RAW files can be seamlessly imported into an OpenShift cluster using Trident’s import functionality and used to provision virtual machines.
Refer to code samples provided under Settings > Developer Access > Script Block
Email Notification & alerts
Email notification can be configured to send alerts about discovery, conversion or migration jobs to specified recipients. UI notification (aka alerts within the UI) is also available which is stored for 7 days.
The email Notification settings are under the Settings pane (Settings > Platform Settings > Email configuration).
Procedure to enable notifications:
- Login to Shift toolkit UI
- Browse to Settings > Platform settings
- Select Email notifications and update SMTP details including SMTP server address, port, username and password
- Update the "recipient" field and select the events from the available category.
- Once done, click Apply.
The screenshot above covers the breakdown for each notification category events.
Note: The email notification uses basic SMTP auth and Sendgrid in this release. In a future release, it will support modern authentication.
Simplified upgrade process
Starting 2.2 release, upgrades are automated and can be completed with a single click. An additional service is added to make the upgrades seamless. Shift toolkit updater service, which listens on port 3002 performs the following steps:
- Downloads the upgrade package.
- Stop the Shift toolkit service
- Extract the files and overwrite the required files.
- Run update and uses the same IP address (retaining the metadata as is).
- Once done, the UI is redirected to Shift toolkit UI listening on port 3001
Note: For deployments without internet connectivity, the upgrade package must be manually downloaded from the NetApp Toolchest and placed in a designated folder (C:\NetApp_Shift). This folder path should be specified during the update process. All other steps remain the same as in the online upgrade procedure.
Abort & revert capabilities
Shift toolkit now provides an option to cancel a running job (irrespective of the step within the workflow). Once the job is cancelled, the orphaned components are cleaned up. For instance, this includes cleaning up the VM on Hyper-V side including power OFF if the VMs were powered ON, removing the disk entries from the appropriate qtree. Since Shift toolkit does not modify the source VM in any way, it is very easy to turn on the VM. There are no other rollback actions apart from simply powering the VM ON.
Virtual Machine preparation flexibility
In this release, the Shift Toolkit introduces greater flexibility in virtual machine preparation. By default, the toolkit automates VM preparation by deploying OS-specific scripts to:
- Remove VMware Tools
- Back up IP settings for reassignment based on the selected Blueprint
With the new enhancement, users can now override the default prepareVM tasks, enabling them to execute custom scripts for manual VM preparation including IP assignment. This provides more control for environments with unique configuration or compliance requirements.
Ability to migrate VMs with spanned VMDKs across multiple volumes
The Shift toolkit UI now automatically select all the spanned volumes that is part of a VM or VMs that are selected for that specific RG. This will list all the volumes in the RG page where we do the datastore – qtree mapping.
That’s a robust set of features designed to simplify your migration journey—and as always, we’re here to support you every step of the way.
To summarize, with the NetApp Shift toolkit, migrating virtual machines (VMs) is no longer a concern. This standalone product enables fast and efficient migration of VMs to any alternate hypervisor. Additionally, it supports disk-level conversions between various virtual disk formats.
Call to Action
If you are planning to migrate to alternate hypervisors, Shift toolkit is here to help. Try it now for free and feel free to follow the detailed, step-by-step documentation at NetApp Docs.
