To start the process, you need to download the virtual disk vmdk file from the ESXi server to the computer you installed the V2V Converter on. For this example, we will take a drive from an ESXi hosted Windows 7 VM, convert it to a Microsoft VHD file, and then attach it as a new drive on a Windows 2008 Server. Once it is installed, launch the program and you should see a window like the image above. When it’s completed, run it to launch the installer and follow the installation wizard you should be fine with all the default options. It’s only a small file so it shouldn’t take you long to download. Apart from anything else, it means that they have an in-depth knowledge of storage systems and virtual disks, enabling them to produce this handy tool. If you haven’t encountered them before, Starwind is best known for their software iSCSI SAN solution, which allows you to present storage space on a Windows system as a shared iSCSI target – essential for advanced virtualization features such as VM High Availability.
The Starwind V2V virtual disk conversion utilityįor this task, we will be using the Starwind V2V Image Converter, which is a free utility available from the Starwind website. In both scenarios, the ability to convert from VMDK to VHD or vice-versa can be a real time saver. Alternatively, you might have a data drive on a Hyper-V VM that you want to copy to an ESXi VM, but for security or speed reasons a network copy is not an option. However, if it’s just the data files you need to access, then this is a quick and easy way to do it – for example, if you have a corrupted Windows 2008 ESXi VM that no longer boots and you want to access the system disk in order to replace some dll files. Instead, use a dedicated conversion utility such as the VMware Converter Standalone, or the Converter plug-in for vSphere as explained in this Petri article: “ Importing Hyper-V VMs Into vSphere.”
to migrate a Virtual PC VM to an ESXi server, as there are several additional steps you would need to carry out to make the virtual disk bootable.
When Should You Use This Guide?ĭon’t use this guide if you are looking to convert an operating system boot drive, e.g.
You can mount a vmdk file within Windows but you need to have the VMware Disk Mount utility installed, whilst if you have Windows 2008 or 7 then you can “attach” a VHD file and give it its own drive letter. In contrast, Microsoft has standardized on the VHD file format for the same purpose, used by Virtual PC and Hyper-V, as well as being natively supported by the Windows 2008/7 file system. VMware’s virtualization products, such as ESXi and Workstation, all use versions of the VMDK file format for their virtual hard disk files – essentially an entire hard disk in a.
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