Moving Virtual Machines from Virtual Server to Hyper-V

If you've been virtualizing with Microsoft technologies, up until last week that meant you were likely using Virtual Server. But now you want the latest and greatest in Microsoft virtualization technology, and that means Hyper-V.  Matthijs ten Seldam has the good news and bad news in his blog:

When you have Virtual Server or Virtual PC virtual machines, you can use them in Hyper-V. However, this requires quite some manual steps. For the minimum, you need to attach the virtual hard disk files (.vhd files) to the hard disk drives in Hyper-V. This requires at least creating a VM from the Hyper-V wizard, opening up the settings for the newly created VM and then configuring the drives (probably IDE) with the virtual hard disk files.

And that doesn't include other settings you might want from the original VM, like CPU resource control and SCSI controllers.

More good news: Matthijs is working on a tool that will make it easier to move VMs from Virtual Server to Hyper-V. He has a screenshot and some details in his blog. Keep an eye out for the tool's release.