
Add-in Cards: Intel Dual Port Server Adapter.Drives: 1x Seagate 500 GB 7200.11 boot drive – 4x Seagate 1TB 7200.12 RAIDZ1.Napp-it storage appliance with 3 TB of usable space: VMware vSphere 5.1 Client installed on a workstation.VMware ESXi 5.1 installable media, and a basic understanding of installing and configuring ESXi.This will make it easy to create the new Virtual Machines in ESXi upon its installation and configuration. We will document all the Hyper-V virtual machine settings, CPU, Memory, Network Cards, IP Adresses, ETC prior to the migration. A good DR Plan will have documented your entire Network Environment, every device, every setting. Data recovery is costly, time consuming, and stressful. I have seen some very nasty situations where clients have failed to implement and test a Disaster Recovery Plan.

STARWIND V2V SOFTWARE
It is a free utility from Starwind Software that performs sector to sector copies of VMDK, VHD, and IMG virtual disks in all three directions. For these cases, I use Starwind V2V Converter. If time is of the essence, and you documented all your Virtual Machines and infrastructure prior to your migration, this can be the fastest way to go. This may seem a bit daunting at first, but this won’t always be the case. This can be achieved by converting the Virtual Hard Disk Drives, then adding them to your newly created Virtual Machines in your new ESXi environment. I like to work smart, not hard, and if I can speed things along while doing multiple tasks at once, I am all for it. I am not necessarily in a hurry in this case rather I prefer spending my time doing many things at once. There is a universal truth across any project. The speed of converting a VM with P2V software can be excruciatingly slow. They all can do a good job, but not necessarily where the job really counts, time. There are many P2V (Physical to Virtual) pieces of software in the wild. For these cases I use a free piece of software, the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Client. This is an excellent way to do things if you don’t have access to the entire network infrastructure or your single responsibility is managing Virtual Machines. You can do live and powered down migrations of your Virtual Machines with Physical to Virtual (P2V), and Virtual to Virtual (V2V), with free conversion utilities.

One way to achieve this is with third party tools that will do all the heavy lifting for you. Physical to Virtual – Virtual to Virtual Conversions If you document your environment, walk through each piece of your environment’s settings for both the old and new hyper-visor, you’re going to have a good idea of what needs to change.

You know what you want your end result to be, but you don’t know exactly how you’re going to get there. The key to any successful project is planning. You can do this the hard way by rolling out a new virtual machine with similar specifications and software components, migrating the data, exporting merging registry keys, Active Directory backup and restores, SQL Database backup and restores, File server backup and restores while utilizing Microsoft Distributed File System for a file server migration, IIS Metabase backup and restores, and the list goes on and on and on. There are several ways to convert a Virtual Machine.
