How to convert a Vmware Server Vitual Machine to a Microsoft Hyper-v Virtual Machine

How to convert a Vmware Server Vitual Machine to a Microsoft Hyper-v Virtual Machine


1) Uninstall VM tools from your VM

2) Shutdown the VM

If your VMs are based on SCSI drives (like mine were – because VMware recommends SCSI) and the operating systems are Windows XP, 2003 or earlier then you have to add the IDE driver to your VM before you shut it down in VMware.
Otherwise you will end up with a converted VM that starts up in Hyper-V with a blue screen of death (BSOD) and 0x0000007B – “Inaccessible Boot Device” error. This is due to the fact that your converted VM will have no Primary IDE Channel and Hyper-V will presume that your converted disk is IDE type and located on the Primary IDE Channel.
Doing a Windows Repair Install can fix the 0x7B Inaccessible Boot Device error – but it’s both time consuming and the result might not be good. (Believe me – I had to redo a migration of a SharePoint installation because a Windows Repair Install messed it up. Luckily I then came up with the solution described below instead).
Please note that adding a temporary IDE disk to your VM is not necessary with VMs running Windows Vista or Windows 2008 – they seem to detect the Primary IDE Channel during initial boot phase.

3) Add a new IDE disk drive to your VM: (any size will do)

Make sure that you select “Adapter: IDE 0 Device: 0” under “Virtual Device Node” while creating the new disk (otherwise you might end up with yet another SCSI disk)

4) 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.

5) 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!

6) Now convert your VMDK file to VHD format using the newest Vmdk2Vhd utility (currently version 1.0.13) that can be downloaded from http://vmtoolkit.com.

7) You can now uninstall VMware Server and install Hyper-V + current Windows Updates on your host server

8) 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.

9) Power it on, Install “Integration Services” and reboot when prompted:

10) Assign the original IP address(es) to your new network card(s)

11) Check device manager

12) Do another reboot