Using vCenter Converter 6.3 with vSphere 8 or VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A)

With so much anticipation for the #vSphere8 release, I should also mention that another very important VMware Product has officially GA'ed today - vCenter Converter 6.3! 🥳

📒RN- https://t.co/b6iEdblRHa
💿DL- https://t.co/TE2cEvLgpH
📜DOC- https://t.co/essV9kCRI1 pic.twitter.com/gDna4kjOIk

— William Lam (@lamw) October 11, 2022

Since the announcement that vCenter Converter was re-returning, customers have been looking forward to the day that vCenter Converter would be an officially supported product again. Luckily, folks did not have to wait long from the early beta almost a month ago and just a couple of days ago, vCenter Converter 6.3 has officially GA'ed!

The goal of this initial vCenter Converter release was to bring functional parity with the last supported release, updated development and security practices and a few minor enhancements including some new Guest Operating Systems and vSphere 7.0 support. The team still has a ton in store for subsequent releases and if there are certain features you really want to see, feel free to leave a comment and I will be sure to share it with PM/Engr team.

With that said, I have also been getting a lot of questions from customers interested in using Converter to migrate workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC-A), especially as they think about modernizing and consolidating their Datacenter infrastructure. While, VMware Cloud on AWS as a destination will be in scope for the next release, I was curious on whether it would work given that vSphere 7.0 support was added to latest vCenter Converter release.

You know what happens when I get curious ... I just have to try it out! 😅

I started with a source vSphere 7.0 Update 3g environment which is running ESXi 7.0 Update 3f and vSAN and converted basic Photon OS 4.0 VM to a destination running VMC-A 1.18 and to my surprise, everything worked perfectly! I was able to successfully power on the VM that I had converted from my homelab environment.

VMC-A 1.20 was also recently released, which is the first essential release to include vSphere 8 and I was also curious if might work with the latest SDDC release. Using the same source environment as above but now specifying destination of VMC-A 1.20 SDDC. While the job was being submitted and I could see the initial VM get created on the destination environment, it quickly failed with the following error: A file I/O has occurred while accessing ".

It is possible that this might be expected and the only thing I could find in the vCenter Converter logs was the following:

2022-10-12T12:48:53.694-07:00 error vmware-converter-server[03940] [[email protected] sub=Ufa.HTTPService] Failed to read request; stream: <io_obj p:0x0842ffe0, h:-1, <pipe '\\.\pipe\vmware-converter-server-soap'>, <pipe '\\.\pipe\vmware-converter-server-soap'>>, error: class Vmacore::TimeoutException(Operation timed out)

In any case, prior to VMC 1.19 & 1.20, vCenter Converter 6.3 can be used if you need to migrate workloads. For those looking for an officially supported solution, the latest HCX 4.4.0+ release now supports VMC 1.19+ and is also the ideal tool for bulk non-disruptive workload migration.

Lastly, I figured I run one more experiment which was to convert from same source vSphere 7.0 Update 3g environment to a destination running the latest vSphere 8 IA release. Again, vSphere 8 was not in scope for this initial vCenter Converter release and I figure it probably would not work, but lets give it a go anyways! To my surprise, the conversion finished without any issues and it even detected the latest VM Compatibility (vHW 20)

In summary, if you have a need to convert workloads up to VMC-A 1.18 SDDC or latest vSphere 8 release, vCenter Converter 6.3 can be utilized and in the future, these environments will officially be part of the interoperability testing with vCenter Converter.