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Convert VMWare image to Hyper-V and stay there forever ;)

Everyone knows that we can convert VMWare virtual machines to Hyper-V with the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 or 2008 R2 through the virtual-to-virtual (V2V) machine conversion process. How to do that you can read here.

But, what to do if we don’t have VMM?
For example; I need convert a few virtual machines from VMWare Workstation (XP, Server 2003 and one Server 2008 R2) to Hyper-V and that VMs I need import on my laptop with Hyper-V role and Windows 8 RP installed.

Here is a small how to:

Step 1.

Uninstall VM tools from your virtual machine. Log into virtual machine, open Control Panel –> Programs and Features and click Uninstall.

Step 2.

Shutdown the virtual machine!
Usually your VMWare VMs are based on SCSI drives, because VMWare recommends SCSI, and the operating systems are Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or earlier then you have to add then you have to add the IDE driver to your VM before you shut it down in VMWare.
Otherwise you will end up with a converted VM that starts up in Hyper-V with a blue screen of death (BSOD) and 0x0000007B – “Inaccessible Boot Device” error. This is due to the fact that your converted VM will have no Primary IDE Channel and Hyper-V will presume that your converted disk is IDE type and located on the Primary IDE Channel.
Doing a Windows Repair Install can fix the 0x7B Inaccessible Boot Device error – but it’s both time consuming and the result might not be good.

Please note that adding a temporary IDE disk to your VM is not necessary with VMs running Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 – they seem to detect the Primary IDE Channel during initial boot phase.

Step 3.

Add a new IDE disk drive to your VM. Make sure that you select “Adapter: IDE 0 Device: 0” under “Virtual Device Node” while creating the new disk (otherwise you might end up with yet another SCSI disk).
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Step 4.

Boot up your virtual machine with both drives connected and check that it detects your new IDE drive (along with a primary IDE channel and a disk device driver). You should be able to see the new drive as “not initialized” in Disk Management.

Step 5.

Power off your virtual machine and remove the newly created IDE disk from your VM (you can delete it from disk as well). Do not power on your VMware Machine again!

Step 6.

Now convert your VMDK file to VHD format using the Vmdk2Vhd utility that can be downloaded from http://vmtoolkit.com.
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Step 7.

Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V. Make sure you select “Use an existing virtual hard disk” and select the VHD file that you just created.

Step 8.

Power it on, and reboot when prompted, also check device manager, and do another reboot.

Step 9.

Check that all your applications and services are running.

NOTE: As I mentioned before, If you have Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 VMs then it’s not necessary to add a temporary IDE disk during migration…

Enjoy migrating to Hyper-V, the best virtualization technology ever Winking smile.

Romeo Mlinar
July 11, 2012
Administration, Hyper-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, Virtualization, Windows 7, Windows Server
8 comments

System Center 2012 – overview

System Center 2012 was released in April. As you probably know System Center 2012 includes seven products; App Controller, Service Manager, Orchestrator, Virtual Machine Manager, Configuration Manager, Operations Manager and Data Protection Manager.
Unlike previous versions where you could buy each product separately, in this version you are buying all the products in one.

What is in the System Center 2012?

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In the next few blog posts I’ll describe each product separately, except Operations Manager (SCOM) and Data Protection Manager (DPM).
Expert for these products is my colleague from Ekobit, Ivica Rebić.

Microsoft System Center 2012 is a comprehensive management platform that enables you to more easily and efficiently manage your IT environments, including your server infrastructure and client devices. With System Center 2012, you get the most cost effective and flexible platform for managing your traditional datacenters, private and public clouds, client computers and devices.
System Center is the only unified management platform where you can manage multiple hypervisors, physical resources and application in a single offering vs multiple fragmented point solutions delivered by competitors.

Microsoft System Center 2012 transforms the way you deliver IT and application services to your organization, optimizing resources across public and private cloud, managed from a single pane of glass.

Cloud computing is transforming the way enterprises provide and consume IT services with the promise of more productive infrastructure and more predictable applications.
Business users see cost saving and flexibility when they consume IT as a Service-a service that they self-allocate through a portal, that scales up or down according to their needs and that they pay for based on use.
Datacenter administrators see cost savings by pooling shared resources into a private cloud that serves multiple business users who consume only what they need. Flexibility comes from leveraging public cloud resources to complement on-premises capacity.
System Center 2012 enables enterprises to benefit from both private and public cloud computing while still satisfying their unique business needs. It organizes existing IT assets (network, storage, compute) into a private cloud that is seamlessly integrated with public cloud services-a hybrid cloud you can manage from a single pane of glass.

System Center 2012 enables you to integrate a wide range of technologies into a coherent private cloud:

* Manage different hypervisors centrally from a single pane of glass with support for Windows Server Hyper-V, VMWare vSphere and Citrix XenServer.
* Monitor Windows Server, Sun Solaris and various Linux and Unix distributions.
* Integrate toolsets from HP, CA, BMC, EMC and VMWare into automated workflows.

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In this scenario I need to move my IT infrastructure to the Private Cloud and in my next blog posts I’ll describe and explain how to prepare IT infrastructure for the Private Cloud! Also I’ll explain hardware requirements, software requirements. How to prepare SQL databases, how to install and configure each System Center products (Virtual Machine Manager, Configuration Manager, App Controller, Service Manager and Orchestrator) separately and so on…

See ya soon Winking smile.

Romeo Mlinar
May 7, 2012
Administration, Hyper-V, Microsoft, SCCM 2012, SCVMM, System Center, Virtualization, Windows Server
0 comments

System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager

This year Microsoft release a new palette System Center 2012 products. Virtual Machine Manager is probably the System Center 2012 product with the most significant updates.
There are a lots of updates in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 to mention them all, but here are few of the most important enhancements.

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 – New features

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 new features can be divided in four segments as shown on picture below:

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1. Infrastructure enhancements

Highly Available VMM server. As Virtual Machine Manager is core of management infrastructure for virtual environment it is really important for this infrastructure to be highly available in todays big datacenters.

2. Fabric Management

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can now manage even more hypervisors: Hyper-V, VMWare and Citrix XenServer. Also it can integrate with remote management such as iLO and SMASH. One interesting thing here is also ability for bare metal provisioning meaning that with Virtual Machine Manager 2012 you can provision Hyper-V even on bare metal computers without much manual work. Cluster creation with storage provisioning is also one of the interesting new features. Regarding the network management enhancements, Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can now integrate with load balancers. Besides that now you can also assign IP and MAC from pools. Dynamic Optimization and new Power Management features are also important updates as described in Cool Features.

3. Cloud Management

Virtual Machine Manager can now abstract server, network and storage resources into private clouds, delegate access to private clouds with control of capacity, capabilities and user quotas. Also now it is rather easy to enable self-service usage for application administrator to author, deploy, manage and decommission applications in the private cloud.

4. Service Management

With Virtual Machine Manager 2012 you can now define service templates to create sets of connected virtual machines, OS images and application packages. Maybe the most important feature in service management is ability to leverage great and power full technologies like Server Application Virtualization (Server App-V).

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 – Cool Features

1. Support for cloud, fabric, and services management

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 has moved into the cloud and services management space. VMM 2012 adds cloud support, where the Cloud is defined as a collection of resources that can be assigned to users or groups. The cloud is composed of a Fabric, which is the underlying IT infrastructure, and Services, which are collections of virtual machines (VM’s) that perform a given task.

2. Dynamic Optimization

The addition of Dynamic Optimization is Microsoft’s answer to VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler. Dynamic Optimization provides cluster-level workload balancing for VM’s. Like the older VMM Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature, Dynamic Optimization lets VMM analyze workloads and dynamically move VM’s to different hosts by using Live Migration. Unlike PRO, Dynamic Optimization doesn’t require Operations Manager. The PRO feature will still be available in Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

3. Power Optimization

A feature closely related to Dynamic Optimization is the ability to optimize the placement of VM’s to minimize power consumption. Power Optimization in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 can use Live Migration to consolidate running VM’s onto fewer virtualization hosts, then power down the unneeded hosts.

4. Enhanced placement rules

Intelligent Placement enabled the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager to evaluate host capacity and suggest the most appropriate virtualization hosts for deployment. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 extends this capability with over 100 virtual machine placement checks and also adds support for custom placement rules. In addition, Virtual Machine Manager 2012 supports multiple virtual machine deployments as services.

5. Upgrade support

Nice feature in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is the ability to perform in-place upgrades from existing Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 with SP1 installations. Customers will be able to upgrade from Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 with SP1 to the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC, and then upgrade from the Virtual Machine Manager 2012 RC to the final RTM release of Virtual Machine Manager 2012.

6. Bare-metal Hyper-V provisioning

Another new feature in Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is the ability to perform bare-metal provisioning of Hyper-V servers. This feature lets Virtual Machine Manager create new Hyper-V hosts on bare-metal systems by using predefined templates.
Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is also integrated with remote management technologies such as iLO (HP’s Integrated Lights Out) and SMASH (Systems Management Architecture for Server Hardware).

7. Manage multiple hypervisors

Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is able to manage all the major virtualization platforms. In Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Microsoft added the ability to manage VMware’s vSphere Server via vCenter Server. With the release of Virtual Machine Manager 2012, Microsoft is adding the ability to manage Citrix XenServer. Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 and ESX 3.0 is not supported.

8. Cluster awareness

At the previous version of Virtual Machine Manager we did not have a cluster-aware application. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 is cluster aware and can be installed on a Windows Server 2008 R2 failover cluster, giving Virtual Machine Manager 2012 improved availability and the ability to fail over to a backup node in the event of a server failure.

9. PowerShell 2.0

Virtual Machine Manager provides PowerShell cmdlets for command-shell management, and actions in the Virtual Machine Manager console can be used as a basis for generating PowerShell management scripts. Virtual Machine Manager 2012 enhances this management capability with full support for PowerShell 2.0.

There are much more enhancements in System Center 2012-Virtual Machine Manager. Check them on technet and start your journey to the Cloud.

I can’t wait RTM, this would be/is a great product from Microsoft System Center team Winking smile.

Romeo Mlinar
March 29, 2012
Hyper-V, Microsoft, SCVMM, System Center, Virtualization, Windows Server
3 comments