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I am facing a small issue for converting my Hyper-V VMs to ESXi VMs.

I have 1 physical server. On that physical server I have Windows Server 2008 installed with the Hyper-V role. My 1 Hyper-V host has 4 Hyper-V guests.

I want to convert my Hyper-V host to ESXi. The problem is all the tools that VMware offers (vCenter Converter) works only if I have 2 physical servers that I can perform a migration on.

I can only think of two options, both of which I am not sure if I will end up with a reliable conversion.

Option 1 : Create a backup images of the 4 Virtual Machines themselves and put them on an external hard drive. Then I would install VMware ESXi and pop in the Windows Server installation disk and restore from a backup.

Option 2 : Use software such as WinImage to convert Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disks to VMware Hard Disk (.vhd -> .vmdk)

Is there a better option than this? The methods I mentioned above can get tedious. I would like to do something like export as VMware VM, put on an external disk, and just load it on when I install ESXi.

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    Is there a reason you want to do this? If you're not buying vSphere (which it doesn't sound like you are), Hyper-V supports a superior set of features for "free"
    – MDMarra
    Feb 27, 2014 at 23:36
  • Using the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone you can select VMware Workstation as the target platform and convert the VM's to a network share rather than convert them directly to a vSphere server.
    – joeqwerty
    Feb 27, 2014 at 23:45

1 Answer 1

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In the past I have used Starwind V2V Converter (free, reg might be required) to convert VMs between Hyper-V and VMware. It works perfectly well offline.

Note that this only converts the disk image file(s). You still get to set up the VM configuration yourself. (Though for me this wasn't really an issue.)

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