Migrate VMs from VMware to Hyper-V

Question

Hi there.

I recently got hired for a new position where one of my first tasks is to migrate some 20 servers remaining on an ESXi environment, over to our Hyper-V cluster.

The VMs are of different guest OS from Windows 2008 - Windows 2016, over to different Linux distros.

I'm aware of Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter, but I was told that this is not an option, because my boss claims it creates too much down time for the customers, as they cannot use the system during the conversion.

So I'm left with - for now - an option of exporting backups from Nakivo Replication & Backup to VHDX files, which I'm trying to attach on Hyper-V with more or less luck.

Some VMs comes up and runs without any problems, while others wont boot at all.
The problem seems to be either that the VMs in question has MBR disks, and also is installed with the BIOS option rather than EFI. This obviously makes a huge difference as far as I can see from my tests and analyzis.

The funny thing is, that for instance a Windows Server 2012, will boot up fine if I choose to create it as a Gen1 VM on Hyper-V, but will fail if I set it up as Gen2 VM.

Some of the servers working is setup as Gen2, and they have GPT disks and are setup with EFI as boot loader.

My question is, now when I'm in this situation where I cannot use a tool which is recommended everywhere for a task like this. Which options do I have for making this work?

I have messed around with some disk conversion using the cmdlet from MVMC, and have used different tools to try and convert some of the disks, but the servers wont boot even though the disks are converted.

Even though the servers boot up as Gen1 VMs, it's a requirement from my boss, that they are setup as Gen2 VMs because of the features with generation 2 VMs like hot expand and performance.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You may want to ask this one in dedicated MVMC forum over here.
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/home?forum=MVMC