Too long.

What with work, kids, work courses, work and what ever else life has been going at 100%. The house is starting to wind down now as we have some big events soon.

Hopefully all will be OK, next week will tell on one, and probably by mid Aug the other big event will be over. now that's the family stuff over onto the other stuff.

Did a AD2008 and Hyper V course recently for a few days. All about some of the new things in Server 2008, AD DNS and of course Hyper V. And it was fun, saw some stuff, got to play with Hyper v away from the work load, work problems for a dew days and that's always cool. Its a nice product, missing some stuff in comparison to VMware server, but easier than MS virtual Server. Well it is in my head - I always seemed to have a mental block that I never bothered getting fixed on Virtual Server. It goes back to the horrible days I spent preparing for my MS exams.

Either way on with the info. I have a number of VMware virtual machines that I worked on, used, and just generally broke. I had what I called templates for these machines, so when I was bored, had done to much to repair it or just forgot to take snapshots, i blew them away and started again. Now trying out HyperV seemed like a good idea, but I couldn't find out how to convert from one to another. apparently there is a MS product coming down the tracks SCCMVMMTC$$%£$"£$ or something like that, but I don't have those bob's. VMware has a converter that's does other funky stuff, and again I don't have their bob's either.

I have Google, time, a great resource in the Minasi Forum, gratious plug, www.minasi.com and well a big happy server box at home that likes challenges. So I came up with this. Its heavily modified, borrowed, robbed and other stuff, but it works.

This will bring a Windows OS, from a physical box, or a VMware Server or any other variant into Hyper-V.

Install latest version of Hyper-V onto Server 2008, link at the bottom. Now changed, so Google some more folks. Its RTM for the last 2 weeks so should be picked up by Microsoft Updates on a purchased Server 2008 with Hyper V Role installed.

On the VMware version uninstall VM tools from your VM.
Shutdown the VM
Add a new IDE disk drive to your VM; (any size will do 2GB will make it quick)
Change this to be IDE Device 0:0, you will probably have to move the CD ROM drive to the other IDE port or channel.
Boot up your virtual machine with both drives connected and check that it detects your new IDE drive (along with a primary IDE channel and a disk device driver). You should be able to see the new drive as "not initialized" in Disk Management.
Power off your virtual machine and remove the newly created IDE disk from your VM (you can delete it from disk as well).
Do not power on your VMware Machine again!

Convert your VMDK file to VHD format using the Vmdk2Vhd utility, link at the bottom. Conversion performance was a lot quicker converting an image from one physical disk to another physical disk, over twice as fast.
Move image from VMware Server machine to Hyper-V machine.
Create a new Virtual Machine in Hyper-V.
Make sure you select “Use an existing virtual hard disk” and select the VHD file that you just created.
Power it on.
Install “Integration Services” and reboot when prompted

Assign the original IP address(es) to your new network card(s)
Check Network Discovery is on, and your host machines Network Addresses.

Do another reboot
Check that everything is running and working OK.
I found DNS had shutdown as well as DHCP.

Links.

HyperV RC1
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=7EDAA89F-9F64-488D-93C0-858D2D8799DF&displaylang=en

VMDK to VHD
http://vmtoolkit.com

Normally you need to use Ctrl-Alt+Left arrow to release the console, but you can double tap the Windows Key to do a similar job, except when in Full Screen Mode.

I've been up to some other training as well. Got lucky enough to get sent on ESX configuration training, but that'll be next week.