Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Mike McIver — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:01:43 GMT

OK ... let's see if it's any good ... here's a test case:

VM is a Domain controller ... Win Svr 2008 R2, on ESXi 4.1 ... it was taken offline in a less than graceful manner leaving DC's out of sync, inaccessible shares, etc. Can access/download/export the files via vSphere client to my Win 7 Ultimate PC. Would like to convert to Hyper-V ... and upload to an Azure Win virtual machine. I have downloaded the "free, simple, standalone tools".

VM has two ".vmdk" files, about 60gb and 200gb.

Downloading any ".vmdk" file, I get a "-flat.vmdk" file ... mvdc says "no suitable drive was found at path...".

Exporting to OVA ... zipeg says "file corrupted or format unsupported".

Are these tools right for this job?

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Roy Mendoza, UpTime IT — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:41:03 GMT

I go way back with virtualization to 2004 and often deployed VMware Server (yes, the version than ran on top of Windows Server). Fast forward to 2012 and quite a few of those VMware Servers are STILL running in production, including all the domain controllers in a 500 user environment. Yes, it runs like a champ! :-)

In the last week, using the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, I successfully and easily converted the Windows Server 2003 Domain Controllers and a Windows Server 2003 SQL server all running on VMware SERVER versions 1.0.4 and 1.0.6 (not ESX or vSphere) to Hyper-V.

The key is to shutdown the VMware Server virtual machine and use the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter command line MVDC.exe program to read the .vmdk files from which MVDC.exe will create the .vhd files.

If you want the resulting .vhd in Dynamic size mode, use the /Dyn command flag. For example, run this command on your Windows Server 2012 physical host machine after copying the .vmdk files to it for conversion:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Solution Accelerator\MVDC.exe" "Server1 Drive C Disk1.vmdk" "Server1 Drive C.vhd" /Dyn

Yes, the resulting .vhd file size will be the maximum disk size of the .vhdk, but you can Compact the .vhd using Hyper-V Management after its created.

Before deciding to use Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, I evaluated many other programs including those mentioned in this blog, but most of them required a live ESX or vSphere server to tap into, which of course, VMware Server is not. For several years, I have also used Imaging and Conversion programs like Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery (aka Symantec Server Recovery) and it works well, but its two step process of backup then conversion is tedious. Going back further, I used Platespin for P2V and V2V, and VMware's nifty converters.

My thorough experiences with Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter have been very positive and productive!

Microsoft, thank you so much for making this tool available!

Now, on to converting the next 15 servers...

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

TDR — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 22:26:15 GMT

mcitp - for better performance and much lower costs.

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

sadrick — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 09:39:02 GMT

Migration from VMware to Hyper V has never been easy for us, always had to face issues with no solution and decided not to keep servers running on VMware.

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Denis Eche — Sat, 19 Jan 2013 14:34:28 GMT

Having a look at the comments i'm wondering if this tools is useful. Anyone has successfully convert virtual Machine from Vmware to Hyperv2012 ?

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Fat Dragon — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:21:22 GMT

Microsoft really confuses me. They tend to be leader in virtualization, but even conversion tool is such a big deal for them. Instead of making simple and efficient tool (as far as I know it shouldn't be so hard), they are making few very different tools. If you compare SCVMM conversion with MVMC you'll notice that they are very different. For example, for SCVMM you must uninstall VMware Tools from guest, and MVMC requires VMware Tools to be installed.

The result is that tools are similar in one thing: both are unsuccessful. In my case SCVMM successfully converts just once in ten attempts. Really. Other nine attempts are failures with message which states that something is wrong with some parameter. Even without telling at least the parameter name.

I'm very, very, very disappointed with both tools.

One can think that I'm VMware guy with malicious intents here. But I'm not - I'm absolutely Microsoft guy, with Microsoft certificates, developing just in .NET from version 1.0 (2000)... And now I'm very disappointed just because stupid conversion. Pff

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Fat Dragon — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 08:06:03 GMT

Although supports Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V hosts, MVMC DOES NOT support Windows Server 2012 guests!!!??? It's already useless.

Formally it doesn't support vSphere 5.1 source hosts, but it works with them. Snapshot, uninstall VMware tools, and grabbing VM files works with 5.1 also.

Conversion lasts way too long (7 hours in my case for 2 x 200GB VM).

And the worst thing for the end - it report some meaningless error (library share access), and after 7 hours - I've got nothing. And even worst - few minutes ago I've finished my third attempt with the same result - nothing.

The tool is ridiculous - don't waste your time.

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

mcitp — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 15:29:09 GMT

Why would you want to downgrade to hyperv?

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Joel Corley — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 17:21:09 GMT

One other issue is that the Microsoft converter uses a VMware API that seems to require a licensed copy of vSphere. It does not seem to work if you are using the free version.

re: Migrate virtual machines from a VMware environment to Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 using a free, simple, standalone tool

Thomas Schittli — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:38:38 GMT

With Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) we just had ... problems, problems and ... problems. 3 out of 5 Machines failed to convert and because MVMC does not offer detailled problem description, we were not able to solve the problems. (e.g. MVMC just says, that there is no more space on the disk (which disk? - all related disks have > 1TByte free disk space…) or MVMC says, that it is not able to connect to the virtual machine (what exactly failed? we were able to ping it, we were able to login to it…)

Fortunately, we've found a converter which *never* failed:

www.5nine.com/vmware-hyper-v-v2v-conversion-free.aspx

The only problems:

- it does not migrate the IP-Configuration, the migrated Ethernet Adapters just use DHCP

- it does not install the latest Hyper-V Drivers (which is easy to do manually)

Kind regards, Thomas