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I have taken over the management an old VMware host. I believe it is VMWare version 2 by what it says in the Control Panel/Programs of the Windows 2008 R2 server. I would like to convert/migrate one of the virtual machines to a Windows 2012 Datacenter R2 Hyper-V platform.

Using the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter v.3 it is unable to find the "Source". A message "Unable to contact VMware host machine." is displayed. The wizard is searching for a "vCenter server, ESX server, or ESXi Server". There is nothing on the host server that indicates it is any of those; just the VMware Server v. 2.0.0.2712 and VMware Remote Console Plug-in v. 2.5.0.122581. I suspect this to be the problem but I am unsure.

Can anyone provide a migration path? Is there a way to upgrade the VMware on the host server to version that can be converted to Hyper-V using MCMC?

Mark
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2 Answers2

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VMware Server 2.0 is kind of old, and had little or no remote management capabilities as we see in ESXi today. It was one of VMware's evolutionary dead ends. Nevertheless this ought to be possible.

What I would do is the following. Note that the VM must be powered off.

  1. Locate VMware Server's datastore. The datastore details will tell you where the files are located.

  2. Use the Starwind V2V Converter (free but registration required) to create a VHD or VHDX from the existing VMDK.

  3. Create a new Hyper-V VM using the new VHD. You will not be able to import the virtual machine settings (e.g. CPU, RAM, etc.) from VMware Server and must recreate these manually.

Michael Hampton
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Heard about Disk2Vhd?

This little tool here will convert your machine (physical or virtual) to a vhd disk on the fly.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee656415.aspx

Noor Khaldi
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