Migration from HyperV to ESXi

[Rejhan P]

Hello guys,

 

I am a 2nd year intern at a small IT service provider company where we currently use HyperV on 3 standalone Virtual Server Hosts at the moment. We don't use SCVMM, but manage the servers and monitor them separately.

 

We are now getting a 4th VSH because we have a new client who insists on using an ESXi hosted server. We want to use the opportunity to restructure our network, cluster the servers together and are contemplating about switching our existing servers ESXi instead of HyperV.

 

Seems to me I am a bit out of my league when it comes to these things, so I would love it if I could have something to contribute on our next meeting.

 

I would love to hear the opinions of some of you more experienced ESXi admins on the following things:
 

1. How you would go about migrating VMs from HyperV to ESXi?
2. Is it possible to do a live snapshot/recovery of the VM in ESXi like one can in HyperV?
3. Is there a way to create a management/monitoring console without having to buy the vSphere license?
4. *personal* As an aspiring system administrator, would you say it makes sense to focus my studies on ESXi or HyperV, taking into consideration the current job market landscape?

 

All replies are very much appreciated, thank you.

[JuztBe]

Working with ESXi from power user perspective. I'm not fully administrating it.

1. There's tools to do that. We used "VMware vCenter Converter" to convert a whole bunch of Hyper-V VM's to vmware infrastructure. There definitely was nuances though.

2. Yes

3. Don't know

4. Probably depends on where you live, but at least here going with ESXi would be a better choice job opportunity wise. 

[Rejhan P]

42 minutes ago, JuztBe said:

Working with ESXi from power user perspective. I'm not fully administrating it.

1. There's tools to do that. We used "VMware vCenter Converter" to convert a whole bunch of Hyper-V VM's to vmware infrastructure. There definitely was nuances though.

2. Yes

3. Don't know

4. Probably depends on where you live, but at least here going with ESXi would be a better choice job opportunity wise. 

Thanks for the reply, JuztBe! The program "VMware vCenter Converter" that you used, does it have the possibility to migrate to a standalone server (not managed by a vCenter server).

Im asking because, after reading your reply, I googled a bit and found this:

"...VMware vCenter server is a centralized management application that lets you manage virtual machines and ESXi hosts centrally. VMware will discontinue Winodws based vCenter server and release only a Linux based vCenter appliance in the future."

 

Most of our VMs are Windows Servers....

[JuztBe]

23 minutes ago, Rejhan P said:

Thanks for the reply, JuztBe! The program "VMware vCenter Converter" that you used, does it have the possibility to migrate to a standalone server (not managed by a vCenter server).

Im asking because, after reading your reply, I googled a bit and found this:

"...VMware vCenter server is a centralized management application that lets you manage virtual machines and ESXi hosts centrally. VMware will discontinue Winodws based vCenter server and release only a Linux based vCenter appliance in the future."

 

Most of our VMs are Windows Servers....

No idea if it can migrate to stand alone server, we migrated to a cluster. Don't know much about the underlying infrastructure beneath it.

 

Biggest nuance regarding Windows servers were Vmware tools. Sometimes they don't update automatically after migration, so mouse doesn't work in web console.

Biggest culprits were older OS servers. Like 2012R2 and below.

So before migration we stored vmware tools install locally. After migration you can launch it only with keyboard. Once it installs, mouse starts working in console. 

[Nick7]

Yes, with VMware vCenter Converter you can convert standalone machines too.

ESX, managed with vCenter, can do all Hyper-V can and more.

Only major issue with VMware is price.

[NelizMastr]

2 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

I would love to hear the opinions of some of you more experienced ESXi admins on the following things:

 

1. How you would go about migrating VMs from HyperV to ESXi?
2. Is it possible to do a live snapshot/recovery of the VM in ESXi like one can in HyperV?
3. Is there a way to create a management/monitoring console without having to buy the vSphere license?
4. *personal* As an aspiring system administrator, would you say it makes sense to focus my studies on ESXi or HyperV, taking into consideration the current job market landscape?

 

All replies are very much appreciated, thank you.

1. You can use vCenter Converter Standalone, but I also have good experience with Starwind V2V converter. It converts the VM directly from Hyper-V to your ESXi server when they are running side by side. Typically, you'll need to do some edits in drive configuration, depending on how your Hyper-V VMs were made.

If you have Gen1 VMs (so no UEFI support) your disks will be connected to a virtual IDE set, when imported in ESXi, you need to set those to IDE as well.

2. Yes, certainly. They work very similarly. One could say Microsoft probably stole it from VMware when they started doing Hyper-V back in 2008.

3. Depends on what you're looking for. You can certainly configure SNMP to monitor data like CPU, RAM and networking, as most monitoring is done.
There's also a monitoring tab for each ESXi host and VM running on it.

4. I'd say knowing both is a big perk. Other hypervisors aren't that common in the IT space, such as XenServer or Proxmox, but ESXi and Hyper-V are everywhere.

Which one to focus on more is dependent on what your specific job requires you to know more of.

[Rejhan P]

Thank you very much for the responses. We will use Veeam Backup and Replication for the migration of the VMs. If that fails we will go with your suggestions.

Very friendly and fast responses... I am positively suprised.

[Jarsky]

15 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

I am a 2nd year intern at a small IT service provider company where we currently use HyperV on 3 standalone Virtual Server Hosts at the moment. We don't use SCVMM, but manage the servers and monitor them separately.

FYI you can add VMware to the SCVMM fabric

 

15 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

We are now getting a 4th VSH because we have a new client who insists on using an ESXi hosted server. We want to use the opportunity to restructure our network, cluster the servers together and are contemplating about switching our existing servers ESXi instead of HyperV.

Keep in mind Clusters have to be the same technology to be in the same cluster, for supportings DRS/HA/EVC vMotion etc...

That is to say...if your existing servers are Intel Xeons, and you want to add a new host into a cluster, it also needs to be an Intel Xeon. 

 

15 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

1. How you would go about migrating VMs from HyperV to ESXi?

You can use VMWare vCenter Converter. You can convert physical machines (P2V) or machines from other platforms like Hyper-V (V2V). You can even convert from VMware workstation & fusion. In many cases you can also do a live migration using this tool. 

15 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

1. Is it possible to do a live snapshot/recovery of the VM in ESXi like one can in HyperV?

Yup ESXi has snapshot and can Quiesce machines if you install VMware Tools. 

 

15 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

1. Is there a way to create a management/monitoring console without having to buy the vSphere license?

I assume by vSphere license, youre talking about the vSphere suite (vCenter, vRealize, etc...)?

ESXi does SNMP so you could do monitoring via that with something like Grafana or Nagios. 

Management though you'll probably have a harder time with. You could use scripts through PowerCLI , depending on what you can find and your experience with Powershell scripting

 

FYI; if you get a VMUG Advantage membership which is $200/year, you get a 12 month license for vSphere, essentially giving you everything for a cheap cost. 

https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership

 

15 hours ago, Rejhan P said:

1. *personal* As an aspiring system administrator, would you say it makes sense to focus my studies on ESXi or HyperV, taking into consideration the current job market landscape?

It depends on what you're doing, but a lot of infrastructure is moving towards IaaS. So unless you're going to be working for one of these companies that provides the actual IaaS infrastructure, then I wouldn't focus to much energy on this. I'd be looking more at Azure & AWS. I certainly wouldn't be doing more than VCP-DCV or 70-652 unless you're going to specifically be working in an IaaS or dedicated compute environment. 

 

I do still currently support some VMware infrastructure, most of it being our in house platforms for our wider business. (We're a communication company like Comcast or AT&T but we do managed services for thousands of businesses, and full ICT solutions for lots of large Enterprise companies).

The majority of our customers however are now hosted in IaaS with a company that we own (which our Cloud Compute engineer team look after), or are hosted on Azure or AWS etc...

 

I assume by System Administrator, you're referring to the full infrastructure. So depending on the scope of your customers, you may find yourself working with Windows Server (Active Directory/GPO, DNS/DHCP, etc..), Citrix, VPN, Database Clusters, Exchange, Skype/Teams, Sharepoint, etc.....if that's the case i'd be concentrating more on cloud services like Azure, Microsoft365 (InTune, Office365, etc..), Citrix Cloud, Trend Micro Cloud,  and  just cloud computing technologies in general. This is where a lot of jobs are starting to become more common and are technologies i'm focusing more on.

 

[remakethegame]

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How you would go about migrating VMs from HyperV to ESXi?

You can either use VMware Converter (https://www.vmware.com/products/converter.html) or 3rd party tools such as Starwind V2V converter (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-v2v-converter). The second one allows to either create VMDK and upload it or convert from Hyper-V to ESXi directly. 

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Is it possible to do a live snapshot/recovery of the VM in ESXi like one can in HyperV?

 

Snapshots - yes, backups - no. Only paid ESXi supporting full backup features. ESXi free blocks CBT and backup API thus backup software will not be able to backup the VM from ESXi free. However, this might be helpful - https://github.com/lamw/ghettoVCB 

 

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Is there a way to create a management/monitoring console without having to buy the vSphere license?

 

AFAIK, ESXi free available via web-console 

 

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*personal* As an aspiring system administrator, would you say it makes sense to focus my studies on ESXi or HyperV, taking into consideration the current job market landscape?

VMware is the leader. Knowing and understanding ESXi is always helpful. Hyper-V is quite easy to work with. I would rather suggest you to study linux, their storage stack, etc.