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This is a useful tool, but spinning it as a victory against vendor lock-in is disingenuous. VM formats are well-documented and do not constitute a barrier to mi

by shykes 14y ago

This is a useful tool, but spinning it as a victory against vendor lock-in is disingenuous. VM formats are well-documented and do not constitute a barrier to migration by any stretch of the imagination. I would love to hear more about the real barrier to migration: the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. Who cares if you can move your app server to VMWare, if it needs low-latency access to 10TB of data sitting in amazon-us-east?

rwmj 14y ago
I helped to write virt-v2v[1], and one difficulty is changing the kernel config / Windows registry config / drivers / etc so the guest can be booted on another hypervisor (Amazon is Xen-based, VMware and KVM are completely different and need different drivers). You have to delve into the filesystem using libguestfs, and make some pretty complex changes. As you say, the other difficulty is copying gigabytes of data across clouds. My colleague at Red Hat wrote snap[2] which can turn Linux guests into digests (basically a base distro name and list of packages and list of config changes), so this can be reduced massively. We're currently extending this work to support Windows and more Linux guest types. [1] http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v [2] http://mo.morsi.org/blog/node/347 http://mo.morsi.org/blog/node/347
d503 14y ago
> the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. AWS Direct Connect might help with that. Anyone have any experience with it? "AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premise to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections." http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
toyg 14y ago
Well, it does move the burden for maintaining compatibility from third-party import tools / glue code / adapters back to the original vendor, which I think is extremely sensible.

by shykes 14y ago

rwmj 14y ago

I helped to write virt-v2v[1], and one difficulty is changing the kernel config / Windows registry config / drivers / etc so the guest can be booted on another hypervisor (Amazon is Xen-based, VMware and KVM are completely different and need different drivers). You have to delve into the filesystem using libguestfs, and make some pretty complex changes. As you say, the other difficulty is copying gigabytes of data across clouds. My colleague at Red Hat wrote snap[2] which can turn Linux guests into digests (basically a base distro name and list of packages and list of config changes), so this can be reduced massively. We're currently extending this work to support Windows and more Linux guest types. [1] http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v [2] http://mo.morsi.org/blog/node/347 http://mo.morsi.org/blog/node/347

d503 14y ago

> the cost and latency hit of cross-cloud network communication. AWS Direct Connect might help with that. Anyone have any experience with it? "AWS Direct Connect makes it easy to establish a dedicated network connection from your premise to AWS. Using AWS Direct Connect, you can establish private connectivity between AWS and your datacenter, office, or colocation environment, which in many cases can reduce your network costs, increase bandwidth throughput, and provide a more consistent network experience than Internet-based connections." http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/ http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/

toyg 14y ago

Well, it does move the burden for maintaining compatibility from third-party import tools / glue code / adapters back to the original vendor, which I think is extremely sensible.