Migrate Windows Virtual Machine From VMWare Workstation to Hyper-v

Sometimes it could be necessary to migrate a Windows Virutal Machine form From VMWare Workstation to Hyper-v.

I thought it was a difficult activities but it wasn’t.

I did some search on google finding lot of third part software that manage this situation, but i didn’t want to use third part software. So the solution was to use a microsoft tool colled Disk2vhd, you can download it form microsoft web site

Something you need to know

Before starting you need to know few things about Virtual Machine (VM) on VMware and Hyper-v.

If you are here you already know what is VMWare Workstation and Hyper-V environment, but maybe you don’t know how your virtual machine are made. You need to know only one thing: virtual machine on both enviroments are made by files, usually 1 file with the configuration of the virtual machine (with CPU, RAM, interface information and with the link to the file containing hard drive) and 1 file with the drive of the virtual machine.

To be clear, here is a schema:

VMWare Worstation

Virtual Machine Name: Ostrich-VM
Configuration file: Ostrich-VM.xml
Drive file: Ostrich-VM.vmdk

Hyper-V

Virtual Machine Name: Ostrich-VM
Configuration file: Ostrich-VM.vmxc
Drive file: Ostrich-VM.vhdx

If you need to migrate from VMWare Workstation to Hyper-v you besically need to migrate file form .vmdk to .vhdx

From VMWare workstation to hyper-v using Disk2vhd

Disk2vhd is a microsoft program useful to create a vhdx file from any workstation microsoft. So for example if you want to create a image of the hard drive of your PC (laptop or desktop it doesn’t matter) you any need to run Disk2vhd on your PC and it will create an vhdx file with the image of your disk and you can use it to create a virtual machine.

So now it easy to understand how to migrate from VMWare Workstation to Hyper-v: 

  1. Open your Virtual Machine with VMWare Workstation 
  2. Copy Disk2vhd files on your virtual machine and run it
  3. Disk2vhd will create a vhdx files that is the image of your virtual machine, this file now is stored in a folder inside your virtual machine. Copy this file from virtual machine to your PC host
  4. Run hyper-v and create new virtual machine pointing vhdx file

That’s it!

Other VMWare stuff

 

 

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