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We have 70+ VM's (all Windows except Elastix PBX and 1 more LAMP server) on 2 hosts running free ESXi 4.1, backed by a Dell PowerVault MD3220i SAN. I am adding another host and another PowerVault MD enclosure to the group. Because of cost considerations we would like to move to Hyper-V 2012. There are 2 options as I understand:

  1. Move all VM's to Hyper-V in one go. I don't know how long this would take. Can this be done over a weekend?

  2. Setup the additional SAN and host on Windows and keep moving the VM's over a period of time

Would appreciate any suggestions. Will there be issues with Elastix PBX and Hyper-V?

Thank you for the responses. To make the question more focused:

  1. Does anyone have experience running Elastix PBX and Apache LAMP stack on Hyper-V in production?

  2. If I move the VM's over time, we would have a mix of esxi and hyper-v hosts + some LUN's in the 3220i will be vmfs and others will be CSV. Is that a problem?

  3. We do not use Active Directory. Are we forced to move to one?

nid15
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    A point of clarification: You can't simply move the virtual machines from vSphere to Hyper-V. You'll have to convert them. – joeqwerty Mar 23 '15 at 23:05
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    It seems like the cost of vSphere licensing (Essentials **$600** or Essentials Plus **$5000**) is worth it versus the time and complexity of migrating 70 virtual machines to Hyper-V. – ewwhite Mar 24 '15 at 15:26
  • To address your specific questions: `1.` Does anyone have experience running Elastix PBX and Apache LAMP stack on Hyper-V in production? - I can't imagine it's any different than running them on vSphere. You're simply changing the hypervisor host. `2.` If I move the VM's over time, we would have a mix of esxi and hyper-v hosts + some LUN's in the 3220i will be vmfs and others will be CSV. Is that a problem? - No. Why would it be? `3.` We do not use Active Directory. Are we forced to move to one? - No. Why would you? There's no requirement for the Hyper-V host to be a member of an AD domain. – joeqwerty Mar 24 '15 at 15:29
  • @joeqwerty, if the Hyper-V hosts are to form a cluster, AD is a requirement. – Massimo Mar 24 '15 at 19:29
  • Right, but I didn't get that from the OP's question. Good for him to know though so thanks for the assist. – joeqwerty Mar 24 '15 at 19:30
  • Thanks for all the replies. We will end up with a total of 4 hosts with quad sockets and 2 SAN's from the existing 3 hosts and 1 SAN so the esxi pricing is substantial. We don't mind administering them individually with vsphere but would like (not must have) to have live migration and incremental backup. Now I have to evaluate if it is worth the hassle... – nid15 Mar 24 '15 at 21:50

2 Answers2

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There's a tool made for this very thing, called the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (currently at version 3.0). As to your questions about time and the best way to do this, those are highly variable, environment-specific things you'll have to figure out on your own. Shouldn't be too hard - pick some typical VMs, time their conversions, extrapolate how long it will take, and pad your estimate a bit, then see if that fits into your maintenance window, or if you have to move the VMs in a more staged fashion.

HopelessN00b
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  • I've also used Disk2VHD, but I don't remember why I used one over the other. - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee656415.aspx – joeqwerty Mar 23 '15 at 23:59
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There is a step by step migration guide at http://blogs.technet.com/b/canitpro/archive/2013/03/24/step-by-step-migrating-from-vmware-to-microsoft-hyper-v-server-2012.aspx. ; which uses MVMC. Option 3 is to start with option 2 and once you've observed some conversion times, see if option 1 is feasible.

As far as your other questions go,

  1. Can't comment- no XP
  2. they are separate luns- I can't see a problem there
  3. yes - failover clusters require AD, but the DC can be a VM on one of the hosts outside of the cluster, but do not make it HA, or place it on shared storage. Also make sure to configure the Auto-Start Action, so your DC boots up with the host.
Jim B
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  • @nid15: As Jim B stated in his answer and as Massimo stated in his comment, if you plan to create a Hyper-V Failover Cluster between two or more Hyper-V hosts then AD is a requirement. If you plan to just deploy a single Hyper-V host then AD isn't a requirement. – joeqwerty Mar 24 '15 at 19:33