Are you looking to migrate VMs across hypervisors. Have you ever wondered how to offload the conversion process to storage for quicker results? Let's examine migrating 5 VMs, each with two 1TB disks in addition to the OS disk, totalling 10TB of data disks plus the OS disk.
Impressive, isn't it? This blog introduces the NetApp Shift toolkit, which can be utilized to simplify and accelerate VM migrations across hypervisors. Let's explore together how the Shift toolkit achieves this.
What’s the problem statement
Given VMware's recent licensing changes, organizations are revisiting their virtualization strategies to improve cost efficiency, scalability, and reduce business risks. This includes optimizing the existing VM estate and adopting either a multi-hypervisor or hybrid cloud approach.
Be it any scenario, ONTAP is the ideal platform for any hypervisor platform. ONTAP supports all the prominent hypervisors in on-premises environments and has first-party data services in each major cloud, supporting VMware cloud offerings and cloud native workloads. This enables organizations to navigate the licensing changes easily by choosing the appropriate deployment model for their workloads.
While optimization activities are ongoing, every organization is evaluating a multi-hypervisor approach so as to reuse their existing hardware investment, which supports a multi-vendor hypervisor strategy, thus strengthening operational flexibility, mitigating vendor dependency, and optimizing workload placement. By combining multiple hypervisors, organizations can tailor infrastructure to meet diverse workload demands while managing costs. Organizations then streamline multi-hypervisor management by leveraging interoperability, cost-effective licensing, and automation.
A critical requirement in this approach is the swift and seamless mobility of virtual machines, guided by SLAs and workload placement strategies. Migrating from one hypervisor to another involves a complex decision-making process for businesses. Key considerations include application dependencies, migration timeline, workload criticality, and the impact of application downtime on the business. However, with ONTAP storage and Shift toolkit, this is a breeze.
How about wicked fast (100x faster) conversions to any hypervisor of your choice using clones, call it VM migration offloader. Below is an example of conversion from VMware to Hyper-V.
Introducing NetApp Shift Toolkit (a simple VM mobility platform)
The NetApp Shift toolkit is an easy-to-use, graphical user interface (GUI) solution that allows to migrate virtual machines (VMs) between different hypervisors and convert virtual disk formats. The whole process utilizes NetApp Snapshots® and FlexClone® technology to quickly convert VM hard disks. Additionally, the toolkit manages the creation and configuration of destination VMs. Does not require additional storage or data center resources.
For detailed information, see my Shift toolkit guide
What are the key benefits:
- Beneficial for organizations looking to optimize VM licensing costs and extend IT budgets.
- Provides flexibility in a multi-hypervisor environment by supporting bidirectional conversion hypervisors.
- Helps minimize long downtime and enhances business productivity.
- Offers choice and flexibility by reducing licensing costs, lock-in, and commitments to a single vendor.
- Reduces virtualization costs with data portability.
- Is offered free from NetApp.
- Provides fully scriptable REST APIs that can be leveraged by automation workflows.
Note: The pre-requisite for Shift toolkit is to have VMs running on NFS volume residing on ONTAP storage. This means if the VMs are hosted on block based ONTAP storage or on third party storage arrays, then VMs should be moved using Storage vMotion to the designated ONTAP based NFS datastores. Guess what, the VMs will remain online during svmotion, ensuring minimal downtime for migrations when moving to target hypervisor.
Shift toolkit can be downloaded here and is available for Windows Systems only.
For detailed installation steps, refer to Installing and setting up Shift toolkit
How Shift toolkit works:
The high-level steps performed are as follows:
- Connects to VMware and Hyper-V to collect host and VM resource metadata
- Allows selection of VMs and Shift toolkit injects the required scripts
- Script to remove VMware tools and retain the IP settings irrespective of the OS type
- VMware tools removal performed at the target
Note: No modifications are made to the source VM, allowing it to be rolled back exactly as it was
Note: Once prepared, VMs should be powered off based on the maintenance window
- Deletes existing snapshots for all VMs in the blueprint
- Triggers VM snapshots for Blueprint – at source
- Trigger volume snapshot before disk conversion
- Clone and convert VMDK to VHDx format for all VMs
- Power ON VMs in protection group – at target
- Register the networks on each VM
- Remove VMware tools and assign the IP addresses using trigger script or cron job depending on the OS type
For detailed information, refer to using the Shift toolkit to perform VM migration
What can Shift toolkit do for you:
Shift toolkit provides flexibility in a multi-hypervisor environment by supporting bidirectional conversion between the following hypervisors:
- VMware ESXi to Microsoft Hyper-V
- Microsoft Hyper-V to VMware ESXi (Upcoming release)
Shift toolkit supports disk-level conversions of virtual disks between hypervisors for the following disk formats:
- VMware ESX to Microsoft Hyper-V (virtual machine disk [VMDK] to virtual hard disk format [VHDX])
- VMware ESX to KVM compatible hypervisors (VMDK to QCOW2)
Note: The converted qcow2 files are compatible with any KVM hypervisors. For example, a qcow2 file can be utilized with RHEL-based KVM using virt-manager to create a VM, as well as with ubuntu KVM, Rocky Linux based KVM and others. The same can be used with Oracle Linux virtualization manager and with OpenShift virtualization after importing using NetApp Trident. The goal is to provide the disk (converted in secs to mins) which can then be integrated into existing automation scripts used by organizations to provision the VM and assign the network. This approach helps reduce overall migration times, with disk conversion handled by Shift toolkit APIs and the remaining script bringing up the VMs.
In future releases, Shift toolkit will support end-to-end migration from VMware to other compatible KVM hypervisors. However, with the current release, the conversion can be performed via the UI or APIs.
Summarizing
NetApp Shift toolkit helps an administrator to rapidly and seamlessly convert VMs from VMware to Hyper-V. It can also convert just the virtual disks between the different hypervisors. Therefore, Shift toolkit saves several hours of effort each time that you want to move workloads from one hypervisor to the other. Organizations can now host multi-hypervisor environments without having to worry about whether workloads are tied down to a single hypervisor. This capability increases flexibility and reduces licensing costs, lock-in, and commitments to a single vendor.
To learn more about this process, feel free to follow the detailed walkthrough:
If you’re planning to migrate thousands of VMs and ready to start simplifying the migration process, NetApp is here to help. https://mysupport.netapp.com/site/tools/tool-eula/netapp-shift-toolkit
