Convert to generation 2 on a VM in Hyper-V 2012 R2 with Powershell

I have done blog posts about why you should create your new VM´s with Windows Server 2012 instead of 2008 R2 or older even if you were not able to create them with the generation 2 at that time as the Windows 2012 R2 was not released back then.

I also did a blog post how to use a third party product to do the migration from generation 1 to 2 with Double Take Move software.

Now I found John Howards script that he has made public that does the migration from generation 1 to 2 🙂 He also has a blog series about generation 2 VM´s that is definitely worth the time to check out.

I got an error when running it though and it seems that it does not work so good with the partition on the gen 1 virtual disk..  It appears that when I have created my virtual machine with the Convert-WindowsImage.ps1 script that only creates one partition the row in the script that checks for $partitions.length fails and I could not get it to continue but when I commented that away I got my first conversion on the way 🙂

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And here you can se in the PowerShell ISE my alteration  🙂

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Now I am sure that John and his team will work and distribute new versions with correct error checking and I am truly glad that they have released this so I could test it right now anyway 🙂 !!

Here is my VM in generation 1

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And here is the converted VM,

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And here you can see that during the conversion that I have two disks attached to my server and that the one at the bottom has got some new partitions for the gen 2 UEFI boot process

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Happy converting and making generation 2 VM´s your standard in Hyper-V

My experience on the newly released VMM 2012 R2 RTM

So as everyone else (at least an ITPRO with some dignity and self respect) I have started to download the System Center 2012 R2 as it was released just some hours ago! The link appeared on my technet subscription page about 1 PM in Swedish time

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I started to Install the VM for my VMM and of course I created it as an Generation 2 VM on my Hyper-V R2 host.. In the preview, VMM could not manage gen2 VM´s but now we will see about that. Before installing VMM I had to download and install Windows 8.1 ADK and an SQL server.

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And then when I had an successful installation I wanted to add at least one Hyper-V server, the funny part here is that I have activated Hyper-V on this Windows 2012 R2 and why it is saying unknown hypervisor beats me 🙂 . Fortunately I could proceed to add the host

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And then I wanted to check the Gen2 VMM server I had created and see if it was viewable in the VMM console and also the system volume could be expanded when the VM was powered on (in earlier versions of VMM that has sometimes been a nono for example with VM additions )

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As you can see there is no possibility in the VMM console to shrink the disk so there I have to use the Hyper-V Manager.. ( I have tried to enter a lower value but the gui won’t allow me to do it) So much for one place for all management.. In the following screendump you can see the option to shrink the storage from the Hyper-V manager wizard.

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 And as you remember one of the new fine features in the Hyper-V R2 was the full feature RDP access to the VM through the VMbus, why has that not been implemented in the VMM??

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 This old vmm viewer reminds me of the VMM 2008 with no additional features that I get in the Hyper-V Virtual machine connection..

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I will continue to explore the VMM 2012 R2 and there might be some more blog posts coming and until then, good luck in your deployments 🙂