Hyper-V VM (With snapshots/checkpoints) migration to VMware vSphere

[netanelbs]

Hi All,

I'm trying to migrate 200 VMs with 9-12 checkpoints (snapshots) for each VM to VMware vSphere 5.5/6 environment.

I want to preserve the entire snapshot tree of the VMs that I'm migrating to VMware from the Hyper-V environement (Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster).

Is that possible? money isn't the issue in that case so we can purchase 3rd party products if needed.

Please let me know.

Thanks.

[LucianoPatrão]

Hi,

Honestly I don't think you can do this. Because you will always need to convert the VM (plus the Virtual Disks) and this will of course consolidate the disks. Besides Hyper-V and VMware differently and using a snapshot(that is a virtual hard disk contents are freeze in a state, included also a copy of the RAM / CPU contents state). Besides that Hyper-V and VMware devices in a VM area different and work different and all need to be converted. Doing that and at the same time preserve the state of a snapshots?? Don't think so.

PS: I will not ask why someone needs 9-12 snapshot in a VM (when we know that snapshots is not backups)

[netanelbs]

Thanks, this is a large QA environment that taking snapshots. In VMware we've limit them to 4 snapshots per VM and of course using PowerCLI we're deleting snapshots automatically older than 72 hours. but this is Hyper-V environment that I'm not managed directly right now and the customer wants me to remove his dependency on this Hyper-V Cluster...

[LucianoPatrão]

Hi,

Don't think you will manage this converting with the snapshots. Particularly from Hyper-V to VMware.

If was me, I will give customer the option to have one initial state and the last one that will be migrated. And create a backup for each state and migrate each state. Convert the final state, then move them to a backup (or isolated environment). Then move the initial state to backup and remove from the environment. Them migrate the final state to the proper QA environment.

But the in the end the customer will only have 2 state (initial and final). Because create and convert 200 VMs for each state will be... even do it for 2 states will be much work and space consuming.

Hope this can help