Move vSphere VMs to Azure Stack HCI

Question

Hello Community,

I´m looking for the best way to move 20 VMware vSphere machines (20 OVA Files existing from export) to Azure Stack HCI. Does anyone have the perfect solution or an idea?
I can´t find any way or documentation on MS docs.

Thank you.
Daniel

Answer 1

Hi Daniel,

Do you only have the exported OVA's, or do you have the vSphere environment and the running VMs too? Most of the migration tools convert the VM from ESXi/vCenter and not the OVA on a file system.

If you do only have the OVA, you could use something like 7zip or WinRar to extract the VMDK(s), and then use a tool like https://cloudbase.it/qemu-img-windows/ to convert it to a VHD/x, or StarWind V2V Converter You'd then create the AzSHCI VM, and attach the VHD/x files.

Hope that helps!
Matt

Answer 2

Hello Matt,

thanks for your answer.
The plan is that I will make 3 Azure Stack HCI hosts out of the 3 existing ESXi hypervisors (vSphere on top), managed from windows admin center.
So i will have no other choice than an ova export.
I will look at qemu as a tool, i have less positive experiences with StarWind.

Daniel

Answer 3

Hi - great, thanks for the update - another option would be to keep 1 ESXi node and 2 HCI cluster nodes, and migrate with tools like SCVMM 2019 (update to manage Azure Stack HCI 20H2 is coming soon), and then re-image the ESXi node, deploy AzSHCI and join it to the cluster.

I suspect the QEMU option may be a little easier. Acronis Cloud Migration is another, and they used to have a free version, but it seems like it's been removed from the website.

Thanks!
Matt