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Migration and Deployment: Migrating Hyper-V Virtual Machines from Server 2008R2 to Server 2012 (Part 10 of 19) by Tommy Patterson

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As you start looking into migrating from Server 2008 / 2008 R2 to Windows Server 2012, one of the things that may really push you to make the move is Hyper-V. With that in mind, it is good to know what it takes to migrate a Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V machine to Server 2012 Hyper-V. In the latest blog post by my peer, Tommy Patterson, he goes over some simple things to do to make the process easier. I am including a quick snippet directly from his blog, but you’ll want to read the full article on Tommy’s blog.

As part of our Migration and Deployment Series today we shift the focus to Hyper-V migrations. First let’s start with a chart on what is possible for upgrading in place:

Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions of Windows Server running Hyper-V are supported as either source or destination servers.

Upgrading to the stand-alone product “Microsoft Hyper-V Server” is not supported, however importing VMs via the migration techniques outlined in this article is supported.

Since in-place upgrades of server operating systems is not something many administrators like to do for various good reasons, a simpler way to upgrade the Hyper-V infrastructure is to simply blow away the current operating system, then install Server 2012 fresh on the hardware. The following steps will describe the process of upgrading the infrastructure without upgrading the OS in place. Before getting started there are some really important file locations we need to take note of:

• VM Config (XML) files

• VM Data (VHD) files

• VM Snapshot (XML) pointer files

It is wise to remove, revert, or apply(depending the individual scenarios) all snapshots prior to proceeding. however it is not required.

Notice first that by default in 2008R2, the VM Config and Snapshot files are located in a separate place from the Disk files. (ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V)

The Virtual Disk files are located in by default in another folder …

Harold Wong

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Thanks for sharing