Migrating virtual machines (VMs) between virtualization environments (Shift Toolkit)

05/12/2025 Contributors

Usecase

Every organization is now seeing the benefit of having multi-hypervisor environment. With recent changes in the market, every organization is deciding on the best course(s) of action by weighing technical and commercial risks including migrating workload VMs to alternate hypervisors and focus on achieving business-defined objectives, and controlling vendor lock-in. This enables them to operate in an optimized fashion wrt licensing cost and extend IT budget on the right areas than spending for those unused cores on a specific hypervisor. However, the challenge has always been around migration time and the associated downtime.

With the NetApp Shift toolkit, migrating virtual machines (VMs) is no longer a concern. This standalone product enables fast and efficient migration of VMs from VMware ESXi to Microsoft Hyper-V. Additionally, it supports disk-level conversions between various virtual disk formats. Thanks to the out-of-the-box capabilities provided by ONTAP, these migrations can be incredibly swift, with minimal downtime. For example, converting a 1TB VMDK file typically takes a couple of hours, but with the Shift toolkit, it can be completed in seconds.

Toolkit Overview

The NetApp Shift toolkit is an easy-to-use, graphical user interface (GUI) solution that allows to migrate virtual machines (VMs) between different hypervisors and convert virtual disk formats. It utilizes NetApp FlexClone® technology to quickly convert VM hard disks. Additionally, the toolkit manages the creation and configuration of destination VMs.

Shift toolkit provides flexibility in a multi-hypervisor environment by supporting bidirectional conversion between the following hypervisors:

VMware ESXi to Microsoft Hyper-V
Microsoft Hyper-V to VMware ESXi (Upcoming release)

Shift toolkit supports disk-level conversions of virtual disks between hypervisors for the following disk formats:

VMware ESX to Microsoft Hyper-V (virtual machine disk [VMDK] to virtual hard disk format [VHDX])
VMware ESX to KVM compatible hypervisors (VMDK to QCOW2)

Figure showing input/output dialog or representing written content

Shift toolkit can be downloaded here and is available for Windows Systems only.

Benefits of VM portability

ONTAP is ideal for any hypervisor and in any hyperscalar. With FlexClone technology. VM portability in minutes is a reality than waiting for longer downtimes or settling down with pass through options.

Shift toolkit:

helps minimize downtime and enhances business productivity.
offers choice and flexibility by reducing licensing costs, lock-in, and commitments to a single vendor.
enables organizations looking to optimize VM licensing costs and extend IT budgets.
reduces virtualization costs with VM portability and is offered free from NetApp.

How Shift toolkit works

At conversion time, Shift toolkit connects to VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V hosts and to shared NetApp storage. Shift toolkit leverages FlexClone to convert VM hard drives from one hypervisor to another by using three key NetApp technologies:

Single volume and multiple protocols

With NetApp ONTAP, multiple protocols can be easily used to access a single volume. For example, VMware ESXi can access a volume that is enabled with the Network File System (NFS) protocol, and Microsoft Hyper-V can access the same volume with the CIFS/SMB protocol.
FlexClone technology

FlexClone allows the rapid cloning of entire files or volumes with no data copy. Common blocks on the storage system are shared between multiple files or volumes. As a result, large VM disks can be cloned very quickly.
VM disk conversion

The NetApp PowerShell Toolkit and Shift toolkit contain a large number of workflows that can be used to perform various actions on a NetApp storage controller. Included are PowerShell cmdlets that convert virtual disks to different formats. For example, VMware VMDK can be converted to Microsoft VHDX, and vice versa. These conversions are performed with FlexClone, which enables very rapid cloning and conversion of disk formats in one step.