Aidan Finn, IT Pro

If you’ve had enough of the expensive VMware and want to get onto the enterprise and cloud ready Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V (which is effectively free if you’re licensing your Windows Server VMs correctly end economically) then you’ll want to convert those VMware VMs.  You could use System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager.

Or you could use a tool that went into beta kind of quietly back in April called the Virtual Machine Converter.

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) provides a Microsoft-supported, freely available, standalone solution for converting VMware virtual machines (VMs) and VMware virtual disks (VMDKs) to Hyper-V virtual machines and Hyper-V virtual hard disks (VHDs). MVMC supports converting virtual machines using the following guest operating systems:

• Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 2
• Windows Server 2003 R2 with Service Pack 2
• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows 7

It supports vSphere 5.0 and 4.1 and:

• Provides a quick, low-risk option for VMware customers to evaluate Hyper-V
• Converts the virtual disks and the VMware VMs configuration, such as memory, virtual processor, and other machine settings from the source
• Uninstalls the VMware tools on the source VM and installs the Hyper-V Integration Services as appropriate
• Includes an easy-to-use wizard-driven GUI simplifying VM conversion
• Supports offline conversions of VMware virtual hard disks (VMDK) to a Hyper-V based virtual hard disk file format (VHD)
• Includes a scriptable Command Line Interfaces (CLI) for performing machine conversion and offline disk conversion which integrates with datacenter automation workflows, such as those authored and executed within System Center Orchestrator. The command line can also be invoked through PowerShell.

Oh, it’s a 3.93 MB download, and apparently it was announced at TechEd just now that it would be freely available.  Nice!  Now there’s no excuse to continue being VMlimited!

EDIT#1:

Damien Caro of Microsoft has blogged on using the Virtual Machine Converter on the MSDN blogs.  Rather interestingly, there is a command line interface (MVDC.exe) allowing you to automate the conversion process.

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This blog post is the property of Aidan Finn (@joe_elway / http://www.aidanfinn.com) and may not be reused in any manner without prior consent of Aidan Finn. You may quote one paragraph from this blog post if you link to the original blog post.

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2. Notes: Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter Solution Accelerator
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5. Storage Spaces Inside a Virtual Machine Is Not Supported