How to Convert a VMWare VMDK to Hyper-V VHD

A customer, who is a VMWare shop, gave me a VMDK file of one of their VMs for development purposes. I don’t have VMWare, but I do have Hyper-V on my dev boxes, so I needed to convert the VMDK virtual disk to a format I could connect to a Hyper-V VM.

Microsoft offers a VMWare VM conversion kit: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42497

The link above has a System Requirements section, please ensure your environment meets them before using the kit.

The kit has several pieces to help you convert a VMWare disk to a Hyper-V (or an Azure IaaS) VM compatible VHD format. There is a nice GUI wizard that will connect to the VMWare host, connect to a Hyper-V host, and convert the machine right across live.

In my case though, I just had the VMDK given to me by the customer. For this type of task, the kit has a whole set of PowerShell commands in a module. To get access to the commands in a PowerShell session, you need to import the module that defines them. Assuming the default kit install directory, you can use this command to import the module from a PowerShell command prompt:

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

With the module imported, several PowerShell commands are made available to perform all kinds of conversion tasks. I used the below command to convert the VMWare VMDK files to VHD. Note that you’ll need to use your own directories and file names for the –SourceLiteralPath and –Destination arguments.

ConvertTo-MvmcVirtualHardDisk -SourceLiteralPath d:\scratch\vmx\VM-disk1.vmdk -VhdType DynamicHardDisk -VhdFormat vhdx -destination c:\vm-disk1

Something to keep in your back pocket should you ever hit this situation.
I have also heard good reports about this tool from Starwind

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 15, 2015
  wow, thank's for that! That's i was looking for... very cool

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2015
  Thanks for this. It is exactly what I needed.

• Anonymous
  September 09, 2015
  I had an old vmdk from VMware Server 2.0 that needed to be rescued, no budget to upgrade VMware, but available Hyper-V slots on a Windows 2008 R2 server. This Powershell call appears to be handling the conversion. Thanks!

• Anonymous
  September 19, 2015
  Thanks for this.  Had all but given up on getting an Esxi working with my old hardware, but HyperV likes my network cards just fine.  Now I can run the VM on it too.

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2015
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 06, 2015
  Super cool and very easy guide to follow for success. Just what i needed and I found that the -vhdtype actually could be vhd and not only vhdx which is not supported if using Azure. Thx.

• Anonymous
  November 04, 2015
  Lots of time saved.

• Anonymous
  November 12, 2015
  The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2016
    I was getting the "... is not a supported disk database entry for the descriptor" errors too. I found that this conversion tool would only successfully convert fixed VMDK disks but not dynamically expanding ones.
  • Anonymous
    July 22, 2016
    I had a similar issue but was able to solve it by modifying the descriptor. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/37482233/463041

• Anonymous
  November 12, 2015
  Michael, I had the same issue, but then realized that there were two vmdk files, one tiny and one huge. Pointing to the tiny one worked. Counter-intuitive, but true...

• Anonymous
  November 12, 2015
  Oh and Tim, thanks for the post, it saved me hours!

• Anonymous
  November 25, 2015
  thanks a lot, this is exactly what i was looking for.

• Anonymous
  December 20, 2015
  Thank you sir!

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2016
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 18, 2016
  The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2016
    You are using powershell 2.0

• Anonymous
  February 03, 2016
  Or you could just use this FREE simple V2V tool from Starwind: www.starwindsoftware.com/converter Hasn't failed me yet.

  • Anonymous
    June 08, 2016
    I didn't see that the MS tool cost anything other than FREE

• Anonymous
  February 22, 2016
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  May 16, 2016
  Thanks. This was exactly what I was looking for. And straight to the point.

• Anonymous
  July 07, 2016
  Thanks Tim! This has saved me hours of time!

• Anonymous
  July 27, 2016
  just starting to use the instruction attached and found after some digging that you need powershell v3 or yourll get a error about root module when trying to import.

• Anonymous
  August 07, 2016
  You are the real mvp.

• Anonymous
  October 08, 2016
  Thank you. Worked for me :-)