Freeing virtual machines - Racemi
Moving virtual servers from one physical server to another is a capability that all hypervisor suppliers offer today. Moving virtual servers from, say, VMware's ESX to Xen to Microsoft's Hyper-V, however, is beyond the scope of the products offered by any single hypervisor supplier. Racemi's Dynacenter is one of the few products that can pull off this trick.
What Racemi has to say about their recent announcement
Datacenter operators now have greater flexibility to migrate VMware, Xen and Hyper-V virtual servers with the latest DynaCenter image-based provisioning and automation software from Racemi.
With Racemi’s latest software, virtual servers can be migrated automatically to different virtual machines, supporting conversions between VMware, Xen and Hyper-V virtual servers in any combination or direction.
DynaCenter automates the movement of entire server images, whether physical or virtual – including operating systems, storage and network configurations and applications – to another physical or virtual server.
Racemi’s technology compares the configurations of the source and destination servers and reconfigures the necessary components and device drivers "in-flight" to ensure that the image can be run on the new server.
Supported operating systems include Windows, Linux, Oracle’s Solaris and IBM’s AIX. Supported hypervisors include VMware’s ESX, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, the open source Xen hypervisor, IBM Logical Partitions (LPARs) and Oracle/Sun’s Logical Domains (LDOMs).
Racemi makes its software available to technology partners to incorporate into their product offerings to provide an easy path for OEMs wanting to add cloud-ready capabilities to their offerings.
Snapshot analysis
As organizations invest in virtualized environments, they sometimes find that one of the major hypervisor products, VMware, Xen or Hyper-V, fits the requirements of a workload better than the others. As they review their applications, they may find that other workloads might do better in one of the other environments. Moving virtual servers from one environment to another is quite difficult and yet, organizations face this requirement from time to time.
Moving a workload to a faster physical server to meet service level objectives might be one situation that requires a move from one hypervisor to another. Moving a workload to a disaster recovery site is another. Mergers and acquisitions often create the need to move things around as well.
Racemi, a company that I've followed for quite some time, is one of the few that offer the tools to make these platform transitions easy.