V2V cold clone process for SBS / exchange / sql / DC’s etc….. (works in vSphere)
Steps to convert from hyper-v guest to vmware guest
- Remove hyper-v integrated services while hyper-v guest is running. (if possible)
- Note down NIC networking details first
- Clean shutdown hyper-v guest
- Use StarWind Converter (free) to convert VHD to “dynamically growing VMware” image and use “IDE” as type. Note “SCSI” does NOT work if you have not got the LSI / BUS drivers in the source image, just use the default options – dynamic vmware and IDE.
- Create VMware guest shell (virtual machine equivalent to hyper-v specs but without the disks) – remove all hard drives, iscsi controller should also disappear.
- Upload the VMDK to same data store as virtual machine and attach to the virtual guest in the right order. They should be detected as “IDE”
- Start new vmware guest
- If you could not remove integrated services (i.e. hot clone), then you MUST disable hyper-v services immediately.
- Install vmware tools – reboot
- Remove hidden NIC and other orphaned devices, and reconfigure network card as per original.
- Windows may need to be re-activated – do this.
Note : converting a machine to use an IDE controller will limit its performance!