change windows 2012 to core mode

Fri, 14 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +1200

Found yourself considering hyper-v? Microsoft has come a long way and is now becoming more popular as a serious contender in the hypervisor area. My preference is still VMware, but some businesses may find their Microsoft allegiance makes hyper-v a valid option.

Note, i do not consider Microsoft a “cheaper” solution in any circumstance. The current state of hyper-v, SDN options, clustering and VMM management falls very short of what VMware has out of the box. Anyhow, if you do choose windows, here is how you remove the GUI - hopefully saving you a little bit of RAM and reducing the running footprint open for attacks and vulnerabilities….

hyper-v to esx conversion

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +1200

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!

Hyper-V on sigtar.com

change windows 2012 to core mode

hyper-v to esx conversion