Last week I was at a customer and worked on setting up an new Hyper-V and SC VMM 2012 R2 environment and also connecting the VMM to their existing VMware. We configured the hosts with Bare-metal deploy and also configured logical switches in VMM. The setup and configuration with both VMM and Hyper-V was very smooth and it seems that they have worked a bit on the R2 release on that part 🙂

When the environment was up and running we also connected it to the customers vSphere 5.0 environment.

In-the-box of the VMM 2012 R2 there is only V2V when moving machines from vSphere to Hyper-V, the P2V function has been removed and is only available in VMM 2012 SP1 and earlier, a microsoft blog has described a way to use a workaround with a VMM 2012 SP1 but that does require a Hyper-V 2012 host and you have to run two VMM servers during the conversion process.

We have tested several VM´s and noticed some disturbing issues in the V2V process.

for a reason unknown the target does not get the source number of vCPU´s and memory setting so a VM that had 4 GB RAM in vSphere would get a static setting of 512 MB RAM, and if it had 2 vCPU in vSphere it got 1 vCPU in Hyper-V.

the next part was that the conversion created VHD´s on the new Hyper-V 2012 R2 and not VHDX for the converted virtual disks… At least it is fixed sized disks so we do not have to worry about partition alignment issues that is the case with the dynamic VHD´s.

And when we tried to migrate a VM with three virtual disks, the v2v process connected all of the to the IDE controllers and not as best practice, the data disks to SCSI… I changed it manually and successfully booted the VM.

 at last we found another bug or something regarding the networking and the migrated VM..

And when the VM was migrated it looked like it was connected to the right network in VMM as you can see on the following screendump from the VM network properties in VMM.

but when the VM booted it did not connect to the correct network and I had to go into the Hyper-V manager and look at the VM configuration and there it showed as no VLAN, once I corrected the issue and checked the vlan id and correct vlan number the VM was on the right network.

The Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (MVMC) that could be used with the MAT has not yet come in a new version that supports vSphere 5.1/5.5 and equally important, the Hyper-V 2012 R2 hosts.. With the MAT you can customise it to set and configure both network inside of the VM´s and also configure correct vlan settings in the VM´s network card based on what the vSphere is configured with.

Maybe I have just been unlucky but all of these issues with the VMM V2V makes it a less desired solution when migrating from VMware in a larger scale.