Introduction

Condensa is Awanio's tool for migrating virtual machines off VMware vSphere/ESXi and onto the Awanio platform. It is deployed as a single self-contained binary and driven from a web UI.

What it does

• Cold migration — for planned moves: a single full copy of each disk, then the VM is created on the target. Simple and deterministic.
• Warm migration — near-zero downtime: the disk is copied while the VM keeps running, then only the changed blocks are synced (using VMware Changed Block Tracking) until the remaining delta is small enough for a brief cutover. Downtime = the final small delta + one boot.

Key concepts

• Provider — a registered source or target. Sources: VMware vSphere/ESXi or OVA/VHD file uploads. Targets: Awanio Cockpit, standalone Awanio Vapor, or Awanio CEP (KubeVirt). You register a provider once; its credentials are stored encrypted.
• VDDK — VMware's disk-access library. Installed once per target host, it lets the target pull disks directly from ESXi and is what makes warm migration possible. See Integration for details.
• Roles — admin has full control; member is an operator that can view providers and run migrations. Every important action is recorded in the audit log.

Where to go next

1. Installation — deploy the Condensa server.
2. Integration — connect a VMware source and an Awanio Cockpit or Vapor target.
3. User Guide — prepare your VMware VMs and run a migration.