Switch to Hyper-V with the Hyper-V Switch Program – Part 2 by Michael Lubanski

As a follow-up to Part 1 on March 8, Microsoft has released version 2 of its Virtual Machine Migration Toolkit in the Hyper-V Switch Program.

Version 2 makes it easier and faster to migrate virtual machines to the Hyper-V platform.

What’s New

• Hyper-V Switch now runs on System Center 2012 and takes advantage of Virtual Machine Manager and Orchestrator 2012
• Virtual Machines can now be migrated from VMware/vSphere version 5 (in addition to 3.5, 4.0 and 4.1)
• Migration of non-English guest operating systems
• Migration of Linux guest operating systems. (Support for Cent, RedHat, SUSE with experimental support for other *nix guests)
• Use of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit v6.6 to discover and assess VMware data
• Ability to restart any failed migrations from the point of failure instead of restarting from the beginning
• Additional network mapping features including MAC and VLAN info
• Enhanced and simplified logging
• New testing / simulation utility
• The ability to delay migration to a future time
• New migration progress bars

Availability

Hyper-V Switch and the Virtual Machine Migration Toolkit is now available in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Germany when using a Microsoft partner to deliver it or Worldwide when using Microsoft Services to deliver it.

Experience

Since the first blog post, we have been busy migrating over 500 VMs at some of our “pilot” customers and adjusting the processes and toolkit to account for our experience. These learnings made up part of version 2 and will also continue to shape the solution. We anticipate migrating another 500 VMs in the next month leading up to a “louder” announcement of the Hyper-V Switch program at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in July.

Windows Server 2012

Our initial testing suggests that the Virtual Machine Migration Toolkit can migrate both Windows Server “8” Guest VMs to the Hyper-V platform as well as other operating systems to a Windows Server “8” Host running Hyper-V. Since Windows Server “8” is still a beta operating system, we cannot officially support it yet, but testing shows that it should work with the toolkit. (Note, Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 CTP is required to manage Windows Server “8” Hyper-V hosts).

Michael Lubanski
US Private Cloud Center of Excellence Lead
Microsoft Services
mlubansk@microsoft.com