VMware Converter Standalone 5.5 - Cold Cloning & Hot Cloning

Varez IT

Hello,

I'm currently using Brian Atkinson's VCP5-DVC study guide and I found the following.

"Since vSphere 5, VMware Converter has been released as a standalone application, and these versions do not support cold cloning. Cold cloning is the process of booting a physical or virtual machine to VMware Converter media and running the conversion from it."

"In VMware Converter Standalone 5.1, hot cloning is used. Hot cloning converts the physical server or virtual machine while it is running the guest OS and applications."

"Exercise 6.15 covers the steps to import a powered-off VM that is hosted by VMware Workstation into a vSphere environment by using VMware Converter." (NOTE: This exercise is using VMware Converter Standalone 5.5)

Is it just me or does the second and third statements appear to contradict each other? I am trying to reconcile these statements in my mind. Either the cloning and import processes are not the same or 5.5 supports hold and cold cloning but 5.1 only supports cold cloning, is that correct?

Thank you in advance for any help!

joelsfood

Cold cloning is bootin ga VM or physical server off the converter media.

Exercise 6.15 isn't cold cloning, it's pointing vmware converter at the VMware workstation files (.vmx, vmdk, etc) that are hosted on a powered on machine.

At least, that's best bet, as I don't have the book myself.

jibbajabba

Correct. Cold cloning was mainly used in the old days where you booted a server from an iso with a PE version of converter and cloned it that way.

It was the only way even for VMs as there wasn't an option to just point converter at a VM. Well it kinda was but was very temperamental and didn't work with every version.

You were only able to use images as a source such as Ghost or Acronis. And even then it was a pain to find the right version.

I addition not many hardware components were supported. Often you ended up with either no network or no storage or neither. And if it worked it took a long long time. A heck of a lot longer than hot cloning.

Since you now can point converter to a VM directly without issues (it just works) and hot cloning is so much faster, there is simply no need for vmware to keep up the iso trying to find drivers which work for every device.

I guess you could say your exercise is more 'warm' cloning than hot or cold

jibbajabba

Oh and converting a VM also meant you had to download it to your local drive first as it could connect to an ESXi server (assume that works now, haven't touched the converter since early 4.x days where it didn't even support GPT driver.

jibbajabba

* couldn't connect