VMWare and Hyper-V VHDs

philjayj · 17 Feb 2010 at 15:25

Good Afternoon!

Can someone tell me if a virtual hard drive created in VMWare, will work on Hyper-V?

Basically, I want to download a Virtual Appliance from VMWare and use it on a Hyper-V server.

Any thoughts/ideas would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Phil

paradigm · 17 Feb 2010 at 15:39

Nope.

You can use Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to perform a V2V conversion. SCVMM isn't a free product though, its licensed, but there is a 180-day free trial

EDIT: Seems it can just work with raw VMX/VMDK files, they don't need to be active.

http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/virtualmachinemanager/en/us/trial-software.aspx

oddjob62 · 17 Feb 2010 at 15:41

Not used it personally... but heard many mentions of vmdk2vhd
http://4sysops.com/archives/free-vmdk2vhd-convert-vmware-vmdk-to-hyper-v-vhd/

Dreamnite · 19 Feb 2010 at 19:49

Be careful when converting a VMDK to VHD and back, by default HV and ESX use different boot loaders, IDE for VHDs and iSCSI for ESX.

I'd go down the V2V root, rather than the converter route. If you do however choose to convert check out this link:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com...v/thread/ef8c12f7-c45d-442e-9a30-c43cd87df3b3

Good luck.

philjayj · 21 Feb 2010 at 21:37

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll give them a shot!

Also, just to follow up, how can I reduce the footprint of a virtualised Microsoft OS, specifically XP Pro?

Cheers