With HyperV beginning to make a dent into the small/medium business world as a solid virtualization solution some of us will need to migrate servers across from VMware to HyperV. There are naturally many many ways to achieve this goal. Personally i have tried Backup Exec Intelligent Disaster Recovery, Acronis True Image with Universal Restore & Windows Backup to name a few.

The release of Microsoft System Center Essentials encouraged me to try SCVMM to conver 3 vmware machines.
All 3 conversions failed from an oobe setup of SCVMM due to issues with NIC, disk drives and a SQL Server timeout (bad switch). These turned out to be because of Trend Micro AntiVirus so make sure you disable AV before trying it. The servers that failed the conversion ran Server 2003/2008 Operating systems. This lead me to search for other options when converting.

I followed an old guide here on technet from 2008.

Converting my Server 2008 server worked ok. For this i went from step 6 onwards.
Converting the Server 2003 servers went a little differently. Both of them had vdmk’s split over 2GB so i had to resolve that first, see http://scolard.com/wordpress/?p=376
Once done i used the same method as the guide with 1 change, rather than adding a virtual HDD on an IDE controller i simply added a CD/DVD-ROM drive on IDE 0-1, which has less messing with vmdk files.
Converting them after this went the same as my server 2008 conversion above.

All 3 VM’s are now running as HyperV Guests with only 1 minor issue. When i assigned the old IP addresses to the new NIC’s windows gave me an error that they were already in use. This meant the old NIC’s weren’t removed. To do this simply open command prompt with elevated rights and type “SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1″. Then open Device Manager and go to View-> Show Hidden Devices. Then Uninstall the old VMware NIC’s.

conversion · HyperV · server 2008 · vhd · vmdk · Vmware

Finally, they arrived, 2 Corsair X64 SSD’s with my name on them. As all new SSD drives are 2.5″ i will need to locate some 3.5″ to 2.5″ adaptors and will post a link when i get it. However the SATA II Raid controller never showed up so I’m going to make do for now with my Desktop, in order to begin the tests i must first explain the rig i am using and the reasons.

My Home PC is water-cooled and quite the effort filled task to undo drives and try not have my ICH9 Raid array decide to Rebuild itself, or worse run a check and repair which last time i ran it took over 24 hours. So without the RAID SATA 2 card (Adaptec) i had to run some tests using my Work PC.

Dell Optiplex 755
Windows Server 2008 R2
Intel Core 2 Duo E7500
8GB DDR2
ATI HD 2400 Pro 256MB

In order to run a benchmark i installed server 2008 R2 (trial) on a 250GB SATA 2 Drive as a 34.47 GB Partition.
I added the Hyper V Role, updated windows and ran a backup to a second drive.
This backup took a minor 2 minutes for a complete File and System Image backup. I then installed a single SSD and restored the image onto this drive.

A Table of Comparisons:

Some simple Disk Benching software showed the SSD’s to be over 600% more efficient at Random Disk Seeks on a simulated busy database server.
However i am not continuing these tests as the Adaptec SATA Raid Card arrived on Friday and on Monday i should have a new test server (HP ML350 G4) with SCSI 320 disks for comparison in RAID 0/1/10.

*Update*

2 of these SSD’s have failed. Corsair have replaced both but this failure rate has knocked a hole in my belief that they can do the job.
I had put 4 of them in a production server and now i’ve gone back to SAS drives.

hdd · server 2008 · ssd

Having seen the recent release of Server 2008 R2 i decided to get rid of the 7100 Build (Release Candidate) that i was using and install a fresh copy at home. As with all my testing this will be done through VMWare Workstation at home on my Desktop PC. Installing the OS itself took 2 hours, probably due to windows updates.

Server 2008 R2

The purpose of this is the new features in Server 2008 R2, such as Direct Access (personal interest in this), and all the tech in Exchange 2010, Office 2010 and Sharepoint integration. Hopefully my dummy lab network i have on personaltechsystems.com will be up and running by next week to show off these features.

As for my comment the other day regarding SSD’s. I’m getting 2 Corsair Performance models @ 72GB each. Specs on these are 220/MB -170/MB read/write and a new Sata controller to go with them. I will have more specs once they actually arrive but they should be here early next week.

2010 · Exchange · Office · R2 · server 2008 · Vmware