Migrate from VMWare Workstation to Hyper-V

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I did an upgrade from an old Athlon 64 to the brand new Athlon II ‘Regor’ platform. Finally my homeserver supports AMD-V, so I could start using Hyper-V. All my virtual machines are hosted using VMWare Workstation, so I need to migrate them to Hyper-V. Here are the steps to take:

Migrating from Windows Server 2003 R2 with VMWare Workstation as a host. To Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 x64.

  1. Install latest updates on guest OS (VM).
  2. Remove VMWare Tools from the virtual machine.
  3. Shutdown the VM. (As I’m running Server 2008, there is no need to add IDE drivers to my VM. If your are running 2003/XP or older, you have to install IDE drivers).
  4. Remove all snapshots.
  5. Convert the VMDK disk to the VHD format using Vmdk2Vhd, download at http://vmtoolkit.com/
  6. Create new virtual machine in Hyper-V, using an existing disk (the converted .VHD from previous step).
  7. Start the VM and login as an admin. Install the Integration Services (Action -> Insert Integration Services Setup Disk). Without this, Hyper-V will not recognize some devices. Like network adapters, pointing devices ..
  8. Set your fixed IP (if your VM had one).

Sources: Convert VMWare to Hyper-V images and HowTo use Hyper-V