Last week at TechEd I attend a session about migrating from VMware tot Hyper-V. Impressive session, which I must attend because a lot of my customers want to migrate from VMware tot Hyper-V because of the huge improvements in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V.
What tools do we have to migrate?
There are a couple of tools available when you would like to migrate from VMware to Hyper-V, but before I mention this tools I will emphasize the importance of preparing your migration with the right tools! You always should use the Microsoft Assessment and Planning toolkit to discover the VMware environment. MAP is an agentless inventory and assessment tool that provide you with that information that you need to do a right sizing of your new Hyper-V environment. Currently version 8.5 is in beta and you can join this beta via Microsoft Connect. You can download version 8.0 over here.
OK assessment done, sizing of the new environment done, and document this sizing in a design document off course. Now let’s have a look which tools can help us with the migration. These are the options:
- System Center Virtual Machine Manager
- Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter
- Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Automation Toolkit
- … and a special one for NetApp customers
System Center Virtual Machine Manager
If you have a System Center 2012 license than you can simply use SCVMM to convert the virtual machines with the P2V or V2V wizard. So it’s up to you if you treat the source VM as a physical machine or a virtual machine. The result is the same. One point of attention when you use SCVMM is that you manually have to remove the VMware tools before you start the conversion. No additional tools or scripts are needed. Note that you cannot perform a P2V or V2V migration while the machine remains online.
Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter
MVMC is a free so called practice accelerator. You can download this tool here. The MVMC provides a Microsoft-supported, freely available, stand-alone solution for converting VMware-based virtual machines and virtual disks to Hyper-V-based virtual machines and virtual hard disks (VHDs)—including conversion from VMware to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012. Because MVMC has a fully scriptable command-line interface (CLI), it integrates especially well with data center automation workflows such as those authored and run within Microsoft System Center 2012 – Orchestrator. It can also be invoked through Windows PowerShell.
MVMC does remove the VMware tools automatically for you. To remove the VMware tools in the source machine you need Windows local administrative permissions on the VM. It also installs the Hyper-V Integration Services automatically.
Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Automation Toolkit
When you had to migrate a lot of virtual machines you should use the Micorosft Virtual Machine Converter Automation Toolkit (MAT). The MVMC automation toolkit is a collection of PowerShell scripts that will automate conversions using MVMC and it is back ended by a SQL instance (SQL Express will work). You can use it to convert several machines at once, on a single server – or scale it out and execute conversions on many servers at the same time.
MAT has a couple of requirements:
- The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC)
- PowerCLI 5.1 from VMware (used to collect VMs)
- SQL Express or any other SQL Server Editions
- A Windows account with rights to execute MVMC locally
- A Windows account with rights to schedule tasks on remote systems and run MVMC (if using remotes)
- A VMware account with admin rights to the ESX server or vCenter
- An account with local admin rights to the guest VM (if the above account does not)
You can download MAT over here.
Lucky, Lucky, Lucky NetApp customers –> NetApp Shift
I think you all understand that migrating virtual machines can take some hours/ days because of the amount of data that is involved. Data needs to be copied from the source VMDK to a destination VHD(x). So calculate some nights/ weekends to perform te migration…
BUT…. if you’re using a NetApp SAN forget those words of migrating can cost you some time and data needs to be copied from source VMDK to destination VHD. With a tool called NetApp Shift Netapp makes it possible to migrate from VMware to Hyper-V without migrating any data! Shift converts a VMDK to VHD in a split of seconds. Now I can try to tell you how this work and how great this is, but I choose the easy way –> you just had to wacht this video:
This is really great isn’t it? It’s a pity that such a great tool is only available for NetApp and that other vendors currently does not provide us with these kind of tools.
For now, good luck with your migration and don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!
