I have written an article about why it was important to start installing your VM´s as Windows 2012 and also I mentioned it in my article about resizing vhdx on the new Windows 2012 R2 and I did not have a solution how to migrate the VM.

Today I have successfully migrated a Generation 1 VM with Windows 2012 standard to a Generation 2 VM on a Windows 2012 R2 Hyper-V host. This involved a third party software from Vision Solutions called Double-Take Move.

What I did was installing a Windows 2012 on a Generation 1 VM and updated to the latest integration components. I configured a static IP, changed server name and added it to the domain. Then I also added some files and installed the Web Server role with a custom webpage to see that the service responded after the fail-over.

Last step was to install the Double-Take Move software.

And for the target I created a Generation 2 VM and installed Windows 2012 and also here updated to latest integration components. In this VM I only installed the Double-Take Move software. The VM was configured with DHCP and no domain join.

Then It was time to create a Move-Job and after a full sync I could do a failover:

And as you can see on the following screendump, the Gen2 VM have got the right settings. And of course my web page responded as expected!

And here is a comparison on the device manager between the two and as you can see that the IDE is gone in the G2.

The Double-Take Move is a powerful tool and it requires a license to work. They also have integration with System Center VMM and Orchestrator to automate a large scale migration. Now I just tried to migrate inside a hyper-v host between two VM´s but I could have done a migration from a VMware environment or a physical server instead :-).

After working a lot with NetIQ Platespin Migrate (which has unfortunately been lagging behind in the development and support for newer os) I now have a positive experience of the Double-Take software and the easy to use and start migrating!