Hyper-V Client to VMWare Workstation

[RussHuffman]

We have a significant investment in Win8 Hyper-V Client VMs, but decided to change to VMWare primarily due to USB and Audio support missing from Hyper-V, and this cripples our use in dev/test.  We were told by pre-sale support that Workstation supports importing Hyper-V, but apparently they didn't know the difference between Hyper-V Server and Hyper-V Client, now it's "tough luck" from their tech support (who also apparently didn't know anything about it from their scripts).

Searching before calling shows I'm not the first to hit this.  I see all sorts of crazy gymnastics including use of VPC and third party free/shareware to get things working, but it's hard to believe that nearly half a year after Win8 is available to the general public, VMWare has NOTHING useful to offer.  Many of our existing VMs are Win8, and as far as I can tell the instructions for their live/hot convert using the Converter 5 does not work with a Win8 guest.  After making the changes suggested, I still get the insufficient privileges error.

So, hoping but not expecting, has anyone found a reasonably sane way to convert dozens of Hyper-V Client VMs to VMW WS?  I've never used VMWare before, but I'm quickly learning to loath it.  If it were not for the missing hardware access in Hyper-V, I would much prefer to stay there.

[RussHuffman]

For the next unfortunate person who has to deal with this, don't bother with "tech support", they don't have a script to deal with this and don't have a clue otherwise.

What I've come up with so far...

1) Delete any snap-shots from source VM in Hyper-V.

2) If your hard drives are not vhd (i.e. are vhdx) use Hyper-V Management "edit" option to convert to vhd.  You'll get a copy in a new location, which also aids in going back when/if you should need to do so.

3) Create a new VM in Workstation, choose the "custom" path, install OS later, and use existing disk choosing your vhd.

The result is a VM that works in Workstation, and I'm using it to make this post.  No idea if other problems may surface, but as slow as this process is (mainly the vhd conversion), it should get us over the initial hump.

Now if I can just get sound to work...

[RussHuffman]

So much for that solution.  Worked ok for 2 Win 8 VMs, but 2 Win 7 VMs both fail to boot even after I manually disabled the Hyper-V services.  So I've wasted most of the day trying to rebuild these things from scratch.  But on a very fast machine where Hyper-V ran fantastic with no performance issues, this process was made even worse by the absolutely abysmal performance of VMWare Workstation.  It literally reminds me of a machine I was running VPC on several years ago.  I absolutely fail to see how VM achieves such a following.  Since MS dropped the ball by excluding features like Audio and USB support (as well as including arbitrary resolution foolishness) I guess I can only hope that there is some magic "make VMWare run like cold molasses" setting that I can find and change to make this bearable.  So far I am the opposite of a satisfied customer...