Microsoft Hyper-V Program Manager, John Howard, has published a series of in-depth level 400 articles on the Generation 2 virtual machine hardware type that was added in WS2012 R2. If you’ve read John’s geat series on SR-IOV then you know what to expect.
One of John’s very useful contributions in the past has been HVRemote, providing an easy way to configure remote administration of workgroup Hyper-V hosts. He didn’t stop there.
After describing the lengthy process of how one could (and it is unsupported) convert a Generation 1 virtual machine into a Generation 2 virtual machine, John wrote and shared a PowerShell utility called Convert-VMGeneration to do the conversion process for you. It is a free tool. It is also unsupported. But considering who wrote it, it should do the job very nicely.
It surprises me that Microsoft doesn’t support converting gen 1 to gen 2 natively within Hyper-V or VMM. I will definitely be putting that script to use when we get new Hyper-V servers.
So … a clarification from John Howard: the process of converting from Generation 1 to Generation 2 is supported, as long as you follow the steps that John has documented. His tool, that implements those steps, is not supported.