another migration technology, Azure Site Recovery (ASR). Although initially
positioned as a replication solution for workloads to Azure, ASR can also be used as a
migration technology, because a migration is simply a replication and then a failover
without ever failing back. ASR is available for free for 31 days per workload, which is
generally enough time to migrate any workload. ASR is covered in more detail in
Chapter 8, “Hyper-V Replica and Azure Site Recovery” but this is the migration
technology of choice going forward for physical and virtual environments to Azure and
Hyper-V.
One manual approach is to use the SysInternals tool Disk2Vhd from the following
location:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
It can be run on any system supporting VSS, and it creates a VHD of the system’s
content. The created VHD file could then be used when creating a new virtual
machine.
The other migration type, V2V, is most commonly from VMware ESX to Hyper-V, and
there are numerous solutions. Many partners have V2V solutions, but Microsoft also
provides options for VMware migrations to Hyper-V.
SCVMM 2016 still has built-in V2V support from VMware and can convert either a
VMware virtual machine running on an ESX host or a VMware virtual machine in the
library. The major conversion task for VMware is converting the virtual hard disks,
because VMware uses the VMDK format, which needs to be converted to VHD.
Additionally, VMware has its own version of Integration Services, called Integration
Components, that is installed into guest operating systems. It must be removed from
the operating system prior to starting on Hyper-V, or the OS will most likely crash.
Note that this does not happen with Hyper-V Integration Services if a Hyper-V VM is
started on a different hypervisor. On startup, Hyper-V Integration Services is triggered
via the BIOS in the virtual machine, which controls the starting of the VMBus. If the
hypervisor is not Hyper-V, the assertion to start VMBus will not occur, and Integration
Services is not started or used. While SCVMM 2016 does have V2V, the focus is
around ASR going forward.
When thinking about any migration, it’s important to understand the workloads you
have and the resources they are using. Microsoft provides a free tool, Microsoft
Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP), which is available from
[http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx. MAP can be used for](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977556.aspx. MAP can be used for)
many scenarios, such as desktop migration, Office planning, and cloud migrations.
However, one key capability is that it can inventory and scan the utilization of
operating systems and then create reports on the findings to help identify good
virtualization and consolidation targets. It is highly recommended to run MAP for a
period of time before performing any migration project to ensure that you have a good
knowledge of the current systems and their real resource utilization.
In Chapter 2, “Virtual Machine Resource Fundamentals,” I talked about differences in