There are some cool things about the new version:

1.    Supports 64-bit Windows 2008/Vista.

2.    No longer requires licensed version to convert a physical source to an ESXi VM from a management station without installing Converter on the source machine (still installs agent of course).

3.    Has options for telling individual services to stop/start or change startup state. This will be VERY helpful for converting a machine and settings services which are known to cause problems to “Disabled” on the target VM, without changing the source machine. Then we can boot the VM, fix stuff, and do what we want with those services. Very handy.

4.    Synchronize source and destination. This will synchronize changes that happen to the source machine during the cloning process.

5.    Power off source machine after cloning (not sure if this is new, but it’s cool).

6.    Status window now includes transfer rate as well as percentage and estimated running time.

I am currently running a conversion of an SBS2008 VM from Hyper-V to ESXi. Both hosts are Quad-Core white-boxes with SATA ICH8 controllers on a gigabit network with a high quality HP switch. I’m getting about 10.8 MB/s. Not great, but at least it tells me how it is doing.

VMware Converter 4 Download link (requires login)

Tags: Converter, P2V, VMware