 Tom here from Orange Systems and a new feature in Zen Orchestra makes getting off VMware a lot easier But I want to answer a couple questions where we talk about the tool and the first one is how does Zen Orchestra compare to VMware? Well, you're in luck. There's a video linked down below where I dive into that topic Are they absolutely every feature in VMware compatible with every feature in XC PNG and they're absolutely a parody? No, there's always a little bit of nuance to it That's why I have a separate video on that topic and didn't want to get to out of scope on this video Next is XC PNG ready for the enterprise? Absolutely. We actually have a lot of consulting we do with large enterprise companies Some of these have dozens of hosts and hundreds of VMs That's just my little aspect of the world when you go ahead and go to their website You can see that they do offer full SLA support agreements They are a open-source tool, but you can buy good SLA level support for your enterprise with XC PNG and of course the combination of Zen Orchestra They have all that on their site actually like the way they do it. So you have XC PNG.org versus.com.com being the business But for those of you that want to use this in a home lab This is where it's just really cool to me the fact that yes, even this VMware import tool will work in your home lab This is not some paid feature that you have to spend money on the fully open source Zen Orchestra I've got a video on how to compile it link down below Opens you up to access all these features. So it's great to use in a home lab And it scales upward to companies running this in data centers So hopefully that clarifies that now let's talk about what they've done and this new tool They've come out with and it needs a little help from you The tool is fairly new and they're still actively testing it. So they're always looking for those edge cases But hey, let's get started with it and talk about VMware imports Now this started with the january 2023 release of zen orchestra 5.79 and we'll jump down here to the big announcement They had which is the vmware migration tool. This is where it started It's our first official release for our vmware migration tool logically called v2v Actually, I like this name better vmware debates fates is the company behind xap and g and zen orchestra And but it also could stand for virtual to virtual now the way we've done this in the past It's simply using some of the backup tools That are normal like your different cloning tools and things like that you set them up Back up you are vmware or actually even any instance that it's on and then use those tools To restore and it's a good way to do your dr testing to a xcp and g system kind of an easy way to get this done But it's way better when you see how this works because this allows you to stand up your new xcp and g infrastructure Connect it to your vmware and import things over So warn migration from vmware to xcp and g is where this started and they have it all kind of charted out So esx ihost your xo a so this is your zen orchestra instance and then your xcp and g host So you're bringing things over now. This is what's neat is because they have the ability to start pulling from Snapshots to try to get things synced up So if you have a large system that you need moved over you can start this migration by getting most of it copied And they have ways to minimize the downtime so we see the way I mentioned when you're using the backup msure software That's going to have more downtime the time it takes you to run the backup The time it takes you to restore to the other machine that downtime may be a little bit inconvenient And of course it gets tedious when you have lots of vms So they're able to go through under a lot of circumstances and pull all these over and bring them over And including each of the snapshots to build this all up now This was originally when it's released in january done all via the command line So now let's move forward and talk about the latest release they have and that's going to be version 5.81 Release march 31st of 2023. So once again more work has been done on this the multi vm import And then we get a whole menu system for us It's no longer command line driven that you can walk through pick the different vms Have it connect directly to your vm or machine all through a ui And I have to do this from the command line being able to pull this in and do the import We also provide various options to help you automation side of things you can stop if there's an error for one vm Or decide if it's only errors in the end finally you can also decide how many vms in parallel you want to import So they go through and they're talking about some of the better error handling they've created for this Now I want to show how this works in our lab system here. You can see this is the community edition This is compiled from sources as I mentioned that way you yourself if you're a homeland person trying to get off a vm Where you have an option here and we're going over here to import and we can say from vm Where you put in a host ip of the vm where your username your password if you need to skip the ssl check And then it connects to your system now. I don't have any vmware infrastructure to test this with I have a friend i'm hoping in the future to do some videos on but this is also a non-destructive process So if you are thinking about getting off a vmware and you set all this hardware up You can try it it either imports the vm or it doesn't it's not going to destroy the vms on the vmware side So this is an easy way for you to start testing Especially if you're curious about getting into xcp and g and see how it's going to perform Hey, as long as you put it on some hardware that's equivalent to your vmware system I think you're going to be pretty impressed with how this system works But if you have problems they do have a forum that's very active right now The developers are listening to feedback and getting engaged with people so this can get sorted out in case or so Edge cases that don't import or different problems people may have I have a link down to that forum post right down below Kind of related to this is people asking about the new xosan that is still under development There's still doing a lot of code to get that all up to date But I have a video where I talk about how storage works in xcp and g And it's not exactly parallel to the way everything vmware does So before you automatically assume you can only live with a hyper converged storage like xosan or the vmware equivalents Look at the way xcp and g handle storage. That's why I dove into it in that video Once you understand how much differently it works It may be that you don't need the system the way you think you do I just bring it up because there's some nuance to the way storage works In the way vmware does it as I've learned I'm less of a vmware expert But I do a ton of zen consulting a lot of zen work and it's something we have Managed for a lot of our clients. So I'm very familiar with the way that works That's why I did that deeper dive video also of note There's lots of great new backup features that are natively built in so that can be another thing when you're doing these VMware migrations is you don't need a separate backup system anymore because it is built into zen orchestra those last couple posts That they've done this year. Actually the several updates this year have not only this vmware tool But lots of enhancements to the backup that I were checking out Maybe I'll do a separate video on that because I need to do a whole separate video Just how the backup works because they've added so many features to it Nonetheless, love hearing from you leave your thoughts and comments down below head on my forum for a more in-depth discussion On this topic and head over to the xcp and g forums read through that link see the different Development matter of fact, that's one of the cool things is they develop so much in the clear and interacting with you People that are using the tools it is just kind of cool to see how this has played out and kind of follow the flow of development to Product and where it's at today. All right, and thanks