ThinkVirt

Back at Virtualization Congress 2009, I had the pleasure of meeting the team from Tranxition, an Oregon-based company.

They have several products available to ease the pain of migrations, but the one product that caught my attention the most was LiveManage for Virtual Migrations. LiveManage for Virtual Migrations is a personality management tool, which means it is not simply a P2V migration tool, but a tool used to export and import user personalities from existing physical or virtual machines into their new virtual home.

Some of the key features listed are:

• 1. Store user personalities anywhere – locally, LAN, WAN or removable media

Just as a trick here, I actually tested this out by storing the personality file to mapped bucket up in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3).

• 2. Select some or all users based on several criteria. Profiles get transported even when users are not logged on
• 3. Audit logs capture each setting/file extracted & injected for each user
• 4. Use File Rules to enforce data storage policies
• 5. Select supported applications with just a few clicks
• 6. Deploy & execute silently via command line argument.

Installation is pretty painless; mostly a next-next-goose type installation.

Once LiveManage for Virtual Migrations is installed, you simply need to select the personality to export from the local machine.

The next step is to select what personality components of the selected user you want to export; the list is quite extensive.

Set any of the advanced settings you may desire:

Then sit back and enjoy the progress:

Injecting a personality is also pretty straightforward; simply select the available personality from the personality store.

I have tested this out several times now with various users and settings, and so far, the extraction and injection process is working as designed. As someone who is very active in the VDI space, this tool will certainly make large-scale migrations less of an end-user nightmare and more of an incognito behind the scenes with the personality remaining the same to the end user.

I have a pretty interesting application of LiveManage for Virtual Desktops that will be discussed in the near future.