CloudShare, a leading supplier of specialized cloud-based IT lab environments for software training, sales demos and PoCs (proof of concept), and development and testing, today announced the immediate availability of a new virtual machine (VM) import tool that makes migrating VMware and Oracle VirtualBox VMs to the cloud much easier and faster than before.
Many organizations and cloud services still rely on file transfer protocol (FTP) to migrate VMs to the cloud. These uploads take hours to complete, and the process is not reliable. Errors are common, especially with large files, and there is typically no way to know whether an error has occurred until the lengthy upload process is complete.
CloudShare’s new VM Import tool checks for potential errors immediately at the start of the process, enabling the vast majority of errors to be detected within two minutes instead of the hours of waiting that FTP-dependent methods require. Plus, if errors occur, CloudShare provides a unique auto-correct feature that users may accept or override. The entire process runs behind the scenes so users can keep working on other tasks until complete. The end result is a custom CloudShare template that includes initial networking, and which can easily be joined with existing pre-built CloudShare templates to create a complex environment in no time.
Benefits of the new VM Import tool include:
- Faster and more reliable than FTP
- Automated error correction
- Intuitive process improves self-service capabilities, reducing demands on customers’ IT resources
- Multi-hypervisor support (VMware vSphere and Oracle VM VirtualBox)
- Easy migration of complex environments to the cloud without the need to re-architect or restructure on-premises applications
“CloudShare makes it easy to recreate and scale extremely complex environments in the cloud, and with our new VM Import tool, we’ve made that task even easier,” said Michal Frenkel, director of product for CloudShare. “It’s yet another example of our ongoing work to simplify cloud. We like to say that, unlike general-purpose cloud companies, we provide our customers not with bricks and mortar, but rather with a completed house. As a result, people outside of the IT department can take full advantage of the cloud’s power for training, sales enablement and dev/test.”
