Quick V2V’s

There are multiple ways to do a V2V depending on your migration/conversion.

See here, here and here for some source examples and more in depth reviews of alternative tools/products, or even V2P as unlikely as that maybe 😛

VMDK to VHDX

This one will be short n sweet.
V2V a VMDK to a VHDX

Get this.

DO this:

Import-Module ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter\MvmcCmdlet.psd1’

ConvertTo-MvmcVirtualHardDisk -SourceLiteralPath (Drive):\VM-disk1.vmdk -VhdType DynamicHardDisk -VhdFormat vhdx -destination (Drive):\vm-disk1

This was nice, but after a good amount of time, I realized I don’t like using Hyper-V much…. so how do you convert back from VHDX to a VMDK?

VHDX to VMDK

I used Linux open source tool;

Using qemu-img in Linux

Ubuntu Linux is used in this example for running qemu-img.

First, install qemu-img from the online software repositories:

sudo apt-get install qemu-utils

*Note if using Ubuntu live you will need to enable the community (*Universe) repository (outside the scope of this post)

Go to the directory where virtual disk images are stored (in this example VHD and VHDX virtual disk files are stored in /media/user1/data/):

cd /media/user1/data/

Check the VHDX file

Get the root privileges (with the sudo su command) and view the VHD image information:

qemu-img info test-disk.vhd

Similarly, you can check the information about the VHDX virtual disk:

qemu-img info /media/user1/data/WinServer2016.vhdx

Convert VHD to VMDK in Linux

In order to convert VHD to VMDK with qemu-img in Linux, run the command as root:

qemu-img convert /media/user1/data/WinServer2016.vhdx -O vmdk /media/user1/data/WinServer2016qemu.vmdk -p

Where:

-O – define the output file format

-p – show the progress bar

Wait until the conversion process is finished.

Using qemu-img in Windows

Download qemu-img from the official web site (32-bit and 64-bit installers are available to download). In the current example, qemu-img-win-x64-2_3_0 is used. Extract files form the downloaded archive, for example, to C:\Programs\qemu-img\. Then launch the Windows command line (CMD) – Press Windows+R to open the “Run” box. Type “cmd” into the box and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run the command as an administrator.

Go to the qemu-img directory:

cd C:\Programs\qemu-img

Commands of qemu-img in Linux and Windows are identical.

Convert VHD to VMDK in Windows

Run CMD as administrator and go to the directory where qemu-img is installed.

View the virtual disk information:

qemu-img.exe info c:\Virtual\Hyper-V\test-disk.vhd

Convert the VHD disk image to the VMDK format:

qemu-img.exe convert -p c:\Virtual\Hyper-V\test-disk.vhd -O vmdk c:\Virtual\Hyper-V\test-disk.vmdk

Where:

-p – show progress

-O – the output file

Wait until the conversion process is finished.

Now the main thing to note is this conversion will be of a “type” that will only work with VMware Workstation… so if you need to mount this VMDK to a ESXi VM, you’ll need to “import it” basically convert it to the proper type… I’m usually a fan of VMware but this one is kind of lame.