Provide tool to onboard (migrate) devices already deployed in the field

A company may already have a fleet edge devices running another operating system, but they are not satisfied with performance or features. Allow these companies to easily migrate an existing fleet of devices to balenaOS and manage them from balenaCloud.

Chris Crocker-White set the status to In Progress

Ken Bannister: Our next migration target is Windows devices. We are building a tool that uses Etcher’s ability to copy and manipulate storage volumes across operating system. We are combining those capabilities with automation of native Windows commands and utilities.

Alex Gonzalez: We are glad to announce the first available release of a minimum viable product for the Windows brownfield migrator at Release v0.1.1 · balena-os/migrator · GitHub.
This version does not yet migrate configuration data, so the devices to migrate need to be using Ethernet with a dynamically assigned IP address (no WiFi, cellular or static IP configuration will migrate), and also will not migrate user data, so please back it up first so it can be restored.
The migrator will install balenaOS over the previous Windows installation, in the same way as booting from a balenaOS flasher image does.

Alex Gonzalez: A reminder that we also have a solution for migrating from some Linux distributions to balenaOS in GitHub - balena-os/takeover: Migrate arbitrary devices to balena. The intention is to merge both products into one in the near future.

We have released v0.3.1 of the brownfield migrator for Windows devices. This version adds migration of network configuration for WiFi, including WPA2 and WPA3 Personal authentication.