Migrating to new Hypervisor.

Question

Migrating to new Hypervisor.

Shahzad Ahmed-C 1

Dear Community,

We are currently using a Hyper-V as hypervisor with storage from separate SAN Technologies (IBM, NetApp, etc.) and all of our VMs are Windows Server 2012R2/2016/2019.

Our management is deciding to change our current virtualization environment and switch to one of the following HCI solutions Sangfor HCI or Nutanix HCI or Azure Stack HCI.

If we chose Azure Stack HCI, I know migrating to it is not going to be difficult as Hyper-V is the hypervisor in it.

But for Sangfor HCI (hypervisor is aSV) and Nutanix HCI (hypervisor is AHV) migrating to them means complete restructuring of our virtual infrastructure and conversion & migration of all VMs.

With respect to above scenario my questions is as follows

"Has anyone used these aSV and AHV hypervisors with Windows VMs as workloads?"
and
"What issues can we face if we convert and migrate our Windows VM workloads on either of them?"

Thanks and Regards.

SavvyProf 1 Reputation point

2022-06-29T19:38:35.617+00:00

In 2020 we migrated from from Hyper-V to Nutanix AHV. It was a very seamless process. Nutanix has a migration tool which provides a lift and shift kind of procedure. You can actually migrate the VM to Nutanix while the VM is running in the production environment. There will be no downtime. But when you do the cutover there will be a downtime for stopping and restarting the VMs. However, you don't have to do cutover immediately after migration. You can decide when to do cutover. But you have to be careful. If you wait too long, then the cutover will take longer as it needs to migrate the changes before the cutover happens. When we did the migration and cutover, our users didn't even notice anything and had no idea that we changed the entire infrastructure. We are very happy with the Nutanix. We had several issue running the Hyper-V cluster. All the issues disappeared once we moved to Nutanix. Nutanix support is top class.

Now, I'm trying to find somebody who moved from Nutanix clusters to Azure Stack HCI. I'm liking whatever I'm reading about Azure Stack HCI. But not sure if the migration would be easier or how much it costs. If the migration and cutover would be as smooth. I'm not sure if I can run all my workloads on the Azure Stack HCI. I'm not sure how resilient it would be. Whether it has good compression and deduplication etc.

SavvyProf 1 Reputation point

2022-06-29T19:38:35.617+00:00

In 2020 we migrated from from Hyper-V to Nutanix AHV. It was a very seamless process. Nutanix has a migration tool which provides a lift and shift kind of procedure. You can actually migrate the VM to Nutanix while the VM is running in the production environment. There will be no downtime. But when you do the cutover there will be a downtime for stopping and restarting the VMs. However, you don't have to do cutover immediately after migration. You can decide when to do cutover. But you have to be careful. If you wait too long, then the cutover will take longer as it needs to migrate the changes before the cutover happens. When we did the migration and cutover, our users didn't even notice anything and had no idea that we changed the entire infrastructure. We are very happy with the Nutanix. We had several issue running the Hyper-V cluster. All the issues disappeared once we moved to Nutanix. Nutanix support is top class.

Now, I'm trying to find somebody who moved from Nutanix clusters to Azure Stack HCI. I'm liking whatever I'm reading about Azure Stack HCI. But not sure if the migration would be easier or how much it costs. If the migration and cutover would be as smooth. I'm not sure if I can run all my workloads on the Azure Stack HCI. I'm not sure how resilient it would be. Whether it has good compression and deduplication etc.

Answer 1

Hi - with this being an Azure Stack HCI forum, you may not get many responses around migration to aSV or AHV - forums on those respective sites may be a better option for that kind of advice.

That said, is there something missing in Azure Stack HCI 20H2 that you feel is better addressed in one of the alternative platforms? We'd be keen to listen to your feedback and help if we can.

Thanks,
Matt

Migrating to new Hypervisor.

1 answer

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