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The main question is:

Can I perform a Virtual to Virtual Conversion from one Hyper-V Server to another Hyper-V Server?

Why I need to convert instead of a myriad of other options:

We've got a RHEL 5 server that somewhere along the way someone took a snapshot of. The snapshot has gone unnoticed for...oh about 9 months. The snapshot is about 800gigs. Other than the massive snapshot everything is just running beautifully.

If a hardware/software/network layout would help in the answering just let me know.

ErnieTheGeek
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  • What are you actually trying to do?? Move it from one server to another (export/import functions for that)? Recover the space from the snapshot (delete snap and turn off VM, will merge forever)? – Chris S Jan 25 '12 at 20:05
  • My goal is to get rid of the snapshot with minimal downtime. I'm expecting it to take about a week to 10 days to fully merge using normal snapshot merge procedures. – ErnieTheGeek Jan 25 '12 at 20:14
  • I've got available servers/storage to migrate to, so hardware isnt an issue. – ErnieTheGeek Jan 25 '12 at 20:15
  • I don't know what hardware you're running but my servers merge at about 100GB per hour. If it's possible to shutdown the VM at night once a day or week for an hour or two it should only take about 4 to 8 nights to merge it. You can interrupt a merge by starting the machine. If that's still not acceptable the export/import function should work, but will take *a while* if the VM has a lot of data on it. – Chris S Jan 25 '12 at 21:21
  • If i'm understanding you correctly, I can let the VM merge for an hour or two and it will actually let me restart without breaking the VM and then the next night I can start merging the snapshot again? – ErnieTheGeek Jan 25 '12 at 21:49
  • You got it. Easy, right? It does work in chunks, so the restart process isn't 100% efficient, but chunks are only several megabytes at a time, so it's not too bad. – Chris S Jan 25 '12 at 23:11
  • get starwinds converter and do a v2v. – tony roth Jan 25 '12 at 23:32
  • @Chris - Going to give it a go tonight and see what happens. Glad I #1 picked you ;) – ErnieTheGeek Jan 26 '12 at 02:35
  • if you do the v2v via starwinds convert it will take a hour at most. – tony roth Jan 26 '12 at 05:10
  • @tonyroth - its a littler safer just letting the merge go through like chris said. If I do the conversion it looks like i'd have to go vhd to vmdk and back to vhd. Lord only knows what kind of...interesting things could happen to my data. – ErnieTheGeek Jan 26 '12 at 14:29
  • either way it will be infinately faster and its completely reliable. – tony roth Jan 26 '12 at 14:48
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    I'd start by taking a backup first :) – dyasny Jan 26 '12 at 17:35
  • You can 'clone' the virtual machine using solutions like Clonezilla. Can both be done live over the network or can be done offline saving it on external disk. – Peter Feb 13 '12 at 01:52

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We ended up just doing a backup and restore to a new VM. After getting everything back online we deleted the old VM and the 1TB snapshot that went with it. It took about two weeks for it to delete.

ErnieTheGeek
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