VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 plugin available
July 25, 2010 1 Comment
Together with the release of vSphere 4.1 VMware as well released vCenter Converter version 4.2.
VMware vSphere 4.1 is the last major release for VMware vCenter Converter plug-in. VMware will continue to provide technical support for vCenter Converter through the end of its support lifecycle. VMware will continue to update and support the free vCenter Converter Standalone product, which enables conversions from sources such as physical machines, VMware and Microsoft virtual machine formats, and certain third-party disk image formats.
Taken from the release notes:
What’s New
The VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 is a substantial upgrade from vCenter Converter 4.1 and includes the following new functionality (previously found only in vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.x):
- Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux sources including:
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, 3.0, 4.0, and 5.0
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.0, 9.0, 10.0, and 11.0
- Ubuntu 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x
- Hot cloning improvements to clone any incremental changes to physical machine during the P2V conversion process
- Support for converting new third-party image formats including Parallels Desktop virtual machines, newer versions of Symantec, Acronis, and StorageCraft
- Workflow automation enhancements to include automatic source shutdown, automatic start-up of the destination virtual machine as well as shutting down one or more services at the source and starting up selected services at the destination
- Destination disk selection and the ability to specify how the volumes are laid out in the new destination virtual machine
- Destination virtual machine configuration, including CPU, memory, and disk controller type
more info at http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_vcc_42_rel_notes.html
About Marcel van den Berg
UP2V 
I would just like to add the following note about 4.2 plugin for vCenter:
– You can no longer create recurring scheduled tasks.
All you can do is create a one-time executed scheduled task, so I’m not sure on how to progress with this. I previously tried 4.0 plugin but it was unsuccessful is doing a P2V of a Server 2008 R2 machine, I read that Win 7 is now supported under 4.2 so I thought I would try the upgrade (small scale deployment so it was fairly easy to upgrade just for this). It is a shame as you could create recurring scheduled tasks in 4.0!