Migrating Servers, Including VMware Virtual Machines to Hyper-V Easily and Automatically Many Tools Available including MVMC Automation Toolkit (MAT)

 tagged GURU-Tip / Hyper-V / PowerShell / SCVMM / System Center 2012 / Tools / Windows Server 2012

Do you have VMware servers that you would like to migrate to Hyper-V.  Well, that is easy.  There is a “Solution Accelerator” that makes it very easy.   the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) is a simple GUI tool that gets a list of VM’s from vCenter and allows you to select a machine for conversion.  This tool only allows you to do one machine at a time though the GUI but it can be automated through the use of PowerShell. Read More about Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh967435.aspx 

The PowerShell sample scripts and instructions were pulled together to create an “automation toolkit”.  The MVMC automation toolkit (MAT) is a collection of PowerShell scripts that will automate conversions using the MVMC.exe. 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 across many servers at once.  Read more about the MVMC Automation Toolkit at http://blogs.technet.com/b/privatecloud/archive/2013/04/08/meet-mat-the-mvmc-automation-kit.aspx 

You can also use System Center Virtual Machine Manager to do the conversion.  You can get a free evaluation from System Center Download.  See details on how to use SCVMM at How to Convert VMware Virtual Machines to Hyper-V.

What if you do not have vCenter or you want to convert a physical server?  We have you covered there too.  You can use the Disk2vhd tool to convert the disks then use them to create a VM on Hyper-V.  To use VHDs produced by Disk2vhd, create a VM with the desired characteristics and add the VHDs to the VM’s configuration as IDE disks. On first boot, a VM booting a captured copy of Windows will detect the VM’s hardware and automatically install drivers, if present in the image. If the required drivers are not present, install them via the Virtual PC or Hyper-V integration components. You can also attach to VHDs using the Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Disk Management or Diskpart utilities. You will want to remove the VMware Integration Components before running the tool. 

There is also an tool to convert VMDK to VHD.  I have not used it but you can read more about it at Tool Review: Vmdk2Vhd – Convert VMware VMDK to Hyper-V VHD

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