NetApp Shift Toolkit - Migration to Alternatives Made Too Easy

The discussion on moving to an alternative hypervisor due to Broadcom acquisition of VMware has been a popular topic mainly due to the cost increase of the licenses required to run VMware software. But let's be honest, there are applications that works only on VMware due to certification or qualification. There are still a bulk of workloads that doesn't requires and this is where an alternative is helpful to drive the cost down.

Even if you have managed to assess and decided on the alternative choice (whatever that is), there are just one important cost that many has overlook and it is the most important. That is migration cost from VMware data format to your alternative data format.

There many paid software for such requirements which are not free and generally price per VM or by the amount of data capacity. They are reliable but purchasing the additional cost for a one time use might not be as viable, not to mention the professional service cost needed on top of that. This takes up cost and time.

The other method would be to use an existing backup software that you own that support VMware and the alternatives, this allows you to backup from one and restore on the other. This save cost but not on time.

Both solutions are all good choices, but both have a common issues; Time. How long can you have your infrastructure keep down for migration to be completed, tested and ready for production again, not mentioning the needed reconfiguration if needed.

That is where NetApp introduce NetApp Shift Tookit. Regardless the size of the VMs, you can do migrate/convert them in minutes. Thanks to Ahmed Al-Nabhani for providing the the details for me to provide this article.

How is that possible where other software is unable to do that?

The magic lies on the storage itself. NetApp as a Storage provider leverage on its storage platform technology to perform the miracles on this. Read this on how it does its magic.

NetApp Shift Toolkit not only reduce the amount of time needed by typical migrations tools on the market, the best part is it comes free on all NetApp storage.

Customers can utilize this on their own, or engage NetApp or its NetApp partners to provide the professional services for assistance. 

What are the alternatives hypervisor are supported?

In short, VMware bidirectional to and from Hyper-V or VMware to any KVM variant that support qcow2 format. I would say almost all KVM hypervisors that support external storage. Check this overview page.

For those interested in the migration workflow, you can refer to this.

In summary, if. you have a need for such migration, do check out NetApp Shift Toolkit. Not only it help in cost but also in time. Which is the most costly variable for an alternative migration.

At the meantime, if you are running any virtualization workload be it on VMware, Hyper-V or any KVM alternatives, NetApp is the only vendor that support almost all the KVM variants and NetApp ASA is only Block storage giving you the ONTAP experience specially catered for virtualization and databases workload with its small footprint yet powerful with a good 99.9999% service level. Check out the details here.