StarWind Software, a provider of hyperconverged solutions, announced the release of the latest version of StarWind V2V Converter - a convenient and safe way to switch between virtual machine formats. 

Many of today's vendors in this market have developed their own VM on-disk format, thus there are many formats to work with.  Therein lies the problem: One hypervisor can't use virtual machines created by another, as different hypervisors use different VM formats. 

As an example, if a company switches from vSphere to Hyper-V, all VMs must be effectively moved to the new environment.  Or enterprise ROBO (Remote Office Branch Office) solutions may involve different hypervisors in the main office and on remote locations, making it inconvenient to move VMs between them.  Additionally, when working with different sets of hardware, moved VMs may experience compatibility issues.  Being able to switch VM formats on demand is essential for a virtual environment.  

StarWind V2V Converter is the software that converts VMs from one format to another, basically "copying" them, while the original is kept as is.  As opposed to the converters typically built into hypervisors, it switches freely from format to format and back, saving much time during migration.

The latest version now has functionality for converting VMDK files directly to and from VMware ESXi Server, so it is not necessary to use the local machine as a destination for VMDK file and copy it to ESXi server after conversion.  They've also added support for VMDK stream-optimized format, a file format that's used for storing virtual disk images with OVF templates for ESX.  And Windows Repair Mode can be activated for the converted image, allowing virtual machines to adapt to the hardware environment of the new hypervisor automatically.