Live Migrating Guest VMs from Hyper-V 2016 to 2022

Question

Hi there,

We currently have a Windows 2016 Hyper-V cluster with two servers and shared storage.

We plan to replace the existing infrastructure with two new servers and new shared storage.

Questions:

1. Can I directly live migrate the guest VMs from the existing cluster to the new cluster using Hyper-V Manager?
2. Or should I perform a two-step migration, first from 2016 to 2019, and then from 2019 to 2022?

Thanks for your advice.

Albert

Answer 1

Hi Albert,

Thanks for your post. Regarding the question 1, we do not recommend the live migration from cluster 2016 to 2022. There are some prerequisites for the upgrade. Complete the following requirements before you begin the Cluster OS Rolling Upgrade process: Verify that the Hyper-V nodes have CPUs that support Second-Level Addressing Table (SLAT) using one of the following methods; - Review the Are you SLAT Compatible? WP8 SDK Tip 01 article that describes two methods to check if a CPU supports SLATs - Download the Coreinfo v3.31 tool to determine if a CPU supports SLAT.

Also, refer the following article for the workflow.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/failover-clustering/cluster-operating-system-rolling-upgrade

2. You should perform a two-step migration, first from 2016 to 2019, and then from 2019 to 2022. Start with a Failover Cluster running Windows Server 2012 R2 or newer. You can upgrade to the next version, for example from Windows Server 2016 to Windows Server 2019.

Best Regards,

Ian Xue

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Answer 2

Yes, you can directly Live Migrate virtual machines from 2016 hosts to 2022 hosts. Because the VMs are in a cluster and moving to hosts in a different cluster, you will first need to remove them from their source cluster. If you want to use the MMCs, do that in Failover Cluster Manager (right-click the VM and click Remove). Then you can use Hyper-V Manager to migrate to a host in the new cluster. Once it arrives, you can then use Failover Cluster Manager to make it HA in the new cluster. You may also want to upgrade its configuration version. Hyper-V Manager will light up that option once it arrives on the new host.

Back up the VMs first! The migration is no-fail -- if anything goes wrong, it will automatically resume on the source host. VMs occasionally break during configuration version upgrades, though.

Two-step migrations are only useful when you want to keep the existing cluster. Because you are introducing an all-new cluster, a two-step migration is a very long waste of time.