P2V from Hyper-V to VMware ESX using VMware’s Convertor 4

During the last week, we have been busy migrating our POS test VM’s from a mixed Hyper-V/VMware server infrastructure to a VMware ESX environment. The majority of our virtual testing environment was run off a single hyper-v server, so the method used for these virtual servers would be P2V, as convertor 4 cannot perform V2V from hyper-v. No such issue with the virtual servers hosted on VMware Server, V2V is supported all the way and worked seamlessly. The P2V migration for the VMs hosted on the hyper-v server also went to plan, with the aid of the tips and caveats listed below.

• Make sure to edit the “Disk Controller” on view/edit options, it defaults to “Preserve source”. If this option is not changed, the migrated VM’s will fail to detect the virtual HDD on power up.
• If you select “Power on target” and “Power off source” on the view/edit option screen, this will lead to both VMs being powered on for a brief period during the final stages of the migration. If you select the option to automatically uninstall the DPM agent from the source VM this period will be extended, as the source VM shutdown will be delayed by the agent uninstall. For our migration I just selected the “power off Source” option and manually powered on the target VM once the source had shutdown.
• Due to the changes in hardware, windows will need to be reactivated after the migration.
• If you allocate/reserve IP’s by MAC addresses in your DHCP environment, these will need to be reconfigured due to the change in the virtual NIC on the target VM. This change in hardware also affects static IP addresses, so it’s a good to review your server infrastructure documentation prior to migration.
• We used Ghost 11.5 via Ghostcast to migrate one Windows 2008 core VM, where the agent could not be installed. Ghost 11.5 cannot image to the .sv2i format required by convertor, but it can export to a .vmdk, this can be used to rebuild the VM on ESX by creating a new VM and selecting the “Existing Disk” option.

All things considered this was a painless migration, and compared to the looming SharePoint 2007 farm migration, I am actually looking forward to the migration of our production Hyper-v environment to ESX.