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Microsoft Hyper-V VM State to Memory Dump Converter

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In development environments or when debugging a customer issue, it is usually a pain to get a crash dump of an existing VM state.

Hyper-V team recently released a tool which can convert a VM saved state to a full memory dump file.

This tool enables easier debugging of issues in the VMs and provides the fastest way to generate a memory dump file from a VM.

It comes as a single executable and with a single command; any saved VM or online snapshot can be converted into a full memory dump file.

You can get the tool from https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/vm2dmp. This location also contains the usage information for the tool.

General Information

Hyper-V(tm) VM State to Memory Dump Converter (vm2dmp) is a command-line tool that converts the saved state of a Hyper-V virtual machine to a full memory dump file compatible with Debugging Tools for Windows. You can use this tool to convert the memory contents of a virtual machine at a point of time to a full memory dump file. The vm2dmp tool makes it easier to debug hard problems when they occur on virtual machines. Using this tool, developers can save time by avoiding the need to create a dump file over a slow debugger connection or from the operating system running inside the virtual machine.

Setup

Copy the vm2dmp.exe to the installation folder for Debugging Tools for Windows (e.g. C:\Program Files\Debugging Tools for Windows\). After this operation vm2dmp is ready to use.

Create a dump file from virtual machine:

vm2dmp.exe –vm VISTASP1-ENT-32 -dmp C:\VM\memory.dmp

Create a dump file from snapshot's state:

vm2dmp.exe –vm VISTASP1-ENT-32 –snap “VISTASP1-ENT-32-snapshot-SP1” -dmp C:\VM\memory.dmp

Create a dump file using virtual machine state files:

vm2dmp.exe -bin C:\VM\example.bin -vsv C:\VM\example.vsv -dmp C:\VM\memory.dmp

Create a dump file using local symbols:

vm2dmp.exe -bin C:\VM\example.bin -vsv C:\VM\example.vsv -dmp C:\VM\memory.dmp –sym C:\symbols

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