I have had the the pleasure to work a bit with Vision Solutions and their product Double-Take Move that can be used when migrating between hypervisors or onto a public IaaS cloud like Azure. I have also made a test to migrate between generation 1 to 2 VM in Hyper-V R2. Last year I made a presentation on Nordic System Center Summit about migration alternatives and tools where I showed the System Center integration of Double-Take Move.

Maybe you have seen the blog post from Migration Mark where he describes the extension of their MAT PowerShell toolkit so it now also support using Double-Take Move and as you can see if you have demands from end users and the company to keep the systems up during the migration then MAT4Move is the tool..

MAT4Move Summary

• TYPE: Streaming disk conversion
• PROS: More uptime than any other solution, migrate directly to Azure
• CONS: Has a cost per VM, Requires an agent

Recently there has come an service pack update to this brilliant software that now also gives support for 2012 R2,  etc. One important update is that it now is possible to select synthetic NIC when migrating directly to a Hyper-V host, in the earlier version you only got a legacy and that is not what we want! Also the possibility to migrate to a VM replica residing on a SMB share. Here you can read more about some of the improvements:

• Common improvements—The following improvements apply to both Double-Take Availability and Double-Take Move.
  • Windows 2102 R2 support—The following job types now support Windows 2012 R2.
    • Files and folders
    • Full server
    • Full server to Hyper-V
    • Full server to ESX
    • V to ESX
    • V to Hyper-V
    • Agentless Hyper-V
    • Agentless vSphere
    • SQL
    • GeoCluster
    • Data migration
    • Full server migration
    • Full server to Hyper-V migration
  • Adapter type on replica—This release allows you to select the type of adapter that will be used on a replica virtual machine for full server to ESX, full server to Hyper-V, full server to ESX migration, and full server to Hyper-V migration jobs.
• Double-Take Move improvements—The following improvements apply to Double-Take Move migration jobs.
  • Alternate volume staging—With this release, you can stage the source’s system state data to an alternate volume on the target, if you do not have enough space on the target’s system state volume.
  • SMB share storage—This release allows you to store the replica virtual machine for a full server to Hyper-V migration job on a local volume or an SMB share.