This is cool – however more details are awaited but Vaughn Stewart of NetApp talks about a project they have been working on called NetApp Shift (atleast that’s the temporary name). Shift is said to be all about moving virtual machines between different cloud platforms.

NetApp Shift is a tool that is used to move the virtual machines from – let’s say – VMware to Windows Hyper V. It uses underlying flex clone technology and does this at lighting fast speeds.

The only downtime for the vms is that a reboot is needed. And that’s it! Currently it works for VMware, Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer but Vaughn says that they will be opening up for more hypervisor vendors soon.

I pinged him asking for support for migrating work loads between Openstack and VMware or any other combination with OpenStack. I am sure its on their road map!

A perfect scenario for this tool is to use a public cloud OpenStack foot print utilizing (highly efficient due to dedup disk savings) NetApp for test environment but seamlessly being replicated to a production NetApp and being migrated into VMware for production deployment using NetApp shift. That is a much realistic scenario in the Enterprise segment where dollar conscious customers don’t want to burn up expensive VMware licenses for test environments and want to be able to test on commodity hardware. It will also be amazing if the use of this tool (NetApp Shift)  is extended to a NetApp virtual appliance as well which will make the above use case much more easier to achieve and implement.

On the flip side – customer’s may want to test applications on other platforms and move it to Openstack foot prints – however I don’t see this likely. More likely is where customers may test from one Openstack foot print and migrate it to another foot print of the same OpenStack distro. Basically a test bed to a production environment. Catch is migration becomes very easy with Shift!

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